Integration and Performance Analysis of Fiber Jamming in a Omnidirectional Actuator

With excellent flexibility and elasticity, nylon fiber can be an ideal filler material for jamming. In this paper, we employ nylon fiber jamming as a stiffness adjustment method and integrate it into an omnidirectionally bending soft actuator. By treating the drive as a cantilever beam for evaluating stiffness performance, the test results showed that the nylon fiber jamming was able to increase the flexural stiffness of the actuator by 194 %. At the same time, it enhances the horizontal output performance of the actuator. At the same time, it also enhances the horizontal output performance of the drive, with a maximum horizontal output force of 1.25 N. Meanwhile, the experimental results show that adding a variable stiffness structure will reduce some of the bending performance of the driver. The final test shows that the integrated fiber jamming structure can effectively improve the stability of the soft actuator. We hope this work could contribute to improve the research on variable stiffness in soft robots.