Soft Pneumatic Arm
Toward realizing the goal of creating an in-home robotic assistant, a prototype of of a soft arm was developed. The arm was inspired by Suzumori’s early efforts into soft robotics (Suzumori et al., 1991) and the STIFF-FLOP, a soft robotic arm developed at The BioRobotics Institute that is used in conjunction with the da Vinci (sic) Surgical System for laparoscopic surgery (Cianchetti et al., 2013, Elsayed et al., 2014, Ranzani et al., 2016, Shiva et al., 2016).
Arm Modules
The Tele-operable In-Home Robotic Assistant (TIHRA) arm is molded from EcoFlex 30 and contains six cambers and a hollow middle channel. Three of the chambers can be inflated to a pressure on the order of 75 kPa to produce motion and extension. Inflating one or two chambers causes the module to bend and inflating all three chambers causes the module to extend. The module was placed inside a sheath to direct these movements. The remaining three chambers are filled with coffee grounds and stiffen when a vacuum is applied to hold the gripper in place or enable it to support a heavier load.