The multi-cavity soft actuator is assembled from single-cavity soft actuator through a reasonable
geometric distribution. It has the characteristic that the pneumatic soft actuator is driven by its own deformation
and has more degrees of freedom. Pneumatic soft actuator is widely used as an emerging discipline and its strong
compliance has been greatly developed and applied. However, as the most application potential type of soft
actuators, there is still a lack of simple and effective deformation prediction methods for studying the spatial
deformation of multi-cavity soft actuators. To solve this problem, a vector equation method is proposed based on
the analysis of the principle of the space deformation of the two-cavity, three-cavity and four-cavity soft actuators.
Furthermore, a nonlinear mathematical model of the air pressure, space position and deformation trajectory of
the soft actuator end is established by combining the vector equation method. Finally, the three-channel soft
actuator is verified through experiments. The results show that the mathematical model can better predict the
space deformation trajectory of the soft actuator, which provides a new research method for studying the space
deformation of the multi-channel soft actuator.
HUO Qianjun (霍前俊), LIU Sheng∗ (刘胜), XU Qingyu (徐青瑜),
ZHANG Yuanfei (张远飞), ZHANG Yaoyao (张耀耀), LI Xu (李旭)
. Bending Prediction Method of Multi-Cavity Soft Actuator[J]. Journal of Shanghai Jiaotong University(Science), 2022
, 27(5)
: 631
-637
.
DOI: 10.1007/s12204-021-2334-0
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