Articulated soft robotics

Compliance is typically concentrated in actuators, transmission and joints (corresponding to muscles, tendons and articulations) while structural stability is provided by rigid or semi-rigid links (corresponding to bones in vertebrates).

Soft robots are often designed to exhibit natural behaviours, robustness and adaptivity, and sometimes mimick the mechanical characteristics of biological systems.

Articulated Soft Robots are built taking inspiration from the intrinsic properties of muscle-skeletal system of vertebrates, whose compliant nature enables humans and animals to effectively and safely perform a large variety of tasks, ranging from walking on uneven terrains, running, and climbing, to grasping and manipulating.

[1] VSAs can vary their impedance directly at the physical level, thus without the need of an active control capable to simulate different stiffness values.

[9] Articulated Soft Robotics realizes a different approach at increasing the safety level of robots interacting with humans by introducing mechanical compliance and damping directly at the mechanical design level.,[10][11]“By this approach, researchers tend to replace the sensor-based computation of a behavior and its error-prone realization using active actuator control, by its direct physical embodiment, as in the natural example.

[13] The dynamic behavior of the actuators with controllable compliance guarantees high-performance, lifelike motion and higher energy efficiency than rigid robots.

[14] The natural dynamics of the robot can adapt to the environment, and thus the intrinsic physical behavior of the resulting system is close to the desired motion.