Phase Changing Materials-Based Variable-Stiffness Tensegrity Structures.

ABSTRACT: Soft robots leverage deformable bodies to achieve different types of locomotion, improve transportability, and safely navigate cluttered environments. In this context, variable-stiffness structures provide soft robots with additional properties, such as the ability to increase forces transmitted to the environment, to lock into different body configurations, and to reduce the number of actuators required for morphological change. Tensegrity structures have been recently proposed as a biologically inspired design principle for soft robots. However, the few examples of tensegrity structures with variable stiffness displayed relatively small stiffness change (i.e., by a factor of 3) or resorted to multiple and bulky actuators. In this article, we describe a novel design approach to variable-s

SUBMITTER: Zappetti D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7301330 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature