A bioinspired fishbone continuum robot with rigid-flexible-soft coupling structure.

Rigid-flexible-soft coupled robots are an important development direction of robotics, which face many theoretical and technical challenges in their design, manufacture, and modeling. Inspired by fishbones, we propose a novel cable-driven single-backbone continuum robot which has a compact structure, is lightweight, and has high dexterity. In contrast to the existing single-backbone continuum robots, the middle backbone of the continuum robot is serially formed by multiple cross-arranged bioinspired fishbone units.

Design and kinematic of a dexterous bioinspired elephant trunk robot with variable diameter.

How to further improve the dexterity of continuum robots so that they can quickly change their structural size like flexible biological organs is a key challenge in the field of robotics. To tackle this dexterity challenge, this paper proposes a soft-rigid coupled bioinspired elephant trunk robot with variable diameter, which is enabled by combining a soft motion mechanism with a novel rigid variable-diameter mechanism (double pyramid deployable mechanism). The integration of these two mechanisms has produced three significant beneficial effects: (i) The coexistence of multi-degree-of-freedom motion capability and variable size function greatly improves the dexterity of the elephant trunk robot.