Optimised Design and Performance Comparison of Soft Robotic Manipulators

Soft robotic manipulators are attractive for a range of applications such as medical interventions or industrial inspections in confined environments. A myriad of soft robotic manipulators have been proposed in the literature, but their designs tend to be relatively similar, and generally offer a relatively low force. This limits the payload they can carry and therefore their usability. A comparison of force of the different designs is not available under a common framework, and designs present different diameters and features that make them hard to compare. In this paper, we present the design of a soft robotic manipulator that is optimised to maximise its force while respecting typical application constraints such as size, workspace, payload capability, and maximum pressure. The design presented here has the advantage that it morphs to an optimal design as it is pressurised to move in different directions, and this leads to higher lateral force. The robot is designed using a set of principles and thus can be adapted to other applications. We also present a non-dimensional analysis for soft robotic manipulators, and we apply it to compare the performance of the design proposed here with other designs in the literature. We show that our design has a higher force than other designs in the same category. Experimental results confirm the higher force of our proposed design.