Bioinspired Continuum Robot's Corrugated Tube Serving as Impeller and Recorder

Bioinspired robots have been proposed and developed for years with their practicality in solving various issues, such as dangerous experiments, extremely narrow exploration sites, and delicate surgeries. Many existed natural mechanisms like elephant trunk, pangolin squama, and inchworm have been analyzed and imitated as machinery constructed by workpieces. The article demonstrates a device that improves the performance of the common bioinspired robot arm. This device was inspired by both common bioinspired robot arms and soft-legged pneumatic robots. The design combined the advantages of two types of robotic machinery under the condition that the two types of machinery both contain their own insufficiencies. This study utilized SolidWorks to construct the idea as a 3D model, which was also convenient to operate detailed adjustments. Ansys was used to analyze and compare the mechanical data of the common robot arms and the improved robot arms, which helped to get the conclusions. The study also analyzed various articles that summarized or explored bioinspired robots, and their experimental processes. The possible scenes robot arms might encounter were inspired by the experimented conditions and drawn by Adobe Illustrator. The design was demonstrated to be successful in that the improved arms data on longitudinal deformation and normal strain were smaller than the common arms under the same force.