Design and experimental validation of a cabledriven continuum manipulator and soft gripper In this investigation, a cabledriven continuum manipulator as well as its soft gripper are designed and developed. The continuum manipulator is made up of two sections, including nine threading plates and eight spring steels. The four cables from the top to the end drive the Section I to bend and deform. The other four cables from the middle to the end drive the Section II to bend and deform. The grasping force and the wrapping area are both considering into the topological optimization process of the soft gripper in order to get a satisfying grasping performance. Moreover, the experiment system including the continuum arm, the soft gripper, and the cabledriven control mechanism is developed. The grasping performance of the soft gripper and the motion control of the continuum arm are validated experimentally.

Design and Kinematics of CableDriven Soft Module Coupled with Spring * Soft robot has become a hot point because it has excellent adaptability and safety with environment However, poor motion accuracy and low stiffness have limit its applications. This paper proposes a cabledriven soft module coupled with spring. It has compact structure, large range of motion, standard plugandconnect connector, and can be easily assembled into a soft manipulator or a gripper. The kinematics of the module and modular manipulator are established based on the piecewise constant curvature (PCC) method. The nonlinear friction of cables and the gravity of the modules have been analyzed to obtain an accurate model. Experiments on modules and manipulators with different sizes and stiffness have demonstrated its accuracy. The modules can reach a maximum bending angle of 180xc2xb0, and the error is within 2.5xc2xb0. The manipulators can reach a total bending angle more than 270xc2xb0, and the error does not exceed 5xc2xb0. Finally a gripper equipped with three modules is developed. It can grasp objects with different shapes, fragility and weights range from 1g to 0.43kg. It also demonstrates the good flexibility and load capacity of the module.