1. A pneumatically-driven snake-like soft robot is characterized by comprising a snake-like soft robot body (1), a corrugated air bag actuator (2), a connecting ring (3), a pneumatic quick plug-in interface (4) and a connecting air pipe (5);

the snakelike-imitating soft robot body (1) is a columnar elastic body made of silica gel materials, three rows of connecting holes (101) are machined in the axial direction, each row is provided with M connecting holes, and the three rows of connecting holes are distributed at 120 degrees in the circumferential direction;

the corrugated air bag actuator (2) is composed of a telescopic corrugated air cavity (201) and an air inlet pipe (202); the air inlet pipe (202) is arranged on the side surface of the corrugated air cavity (201); the air inlet pipe (202) is arranged in a connecting hole (101) of the robot body (1);

the main body of the connecting ring (3) is annular, three fixing clamp sleeves (301) which are arranged at 120 degrees are arranged on the annular, and each fixing clamp sleeve (301) is provided with a vent hole (302) and an annular connector (303); the inner ring of the connecting ring (3) is matched with the snake-shaped-like soft robot main body (1) to realize the radial limit of the snake-shaped-like soft robot; the annular connector (303) is matched with the air inlet pipe (202), and two sides of the vent hole (302) are matched with the pneumatic quick plugging interface (4);

the pneumatic quick plugging interface (4) is connected with an air source and a vent hole (302) on the connecting ring; sealing between the vent hole (302) and the air inlet pipe (302) and an air source is realized, and air leakage is prevented;

the connecting air pipe 5 is connected with the pneumatic quick plugging interfaces 4 at two sides of the vent hole 302, all the connecting rings 3 are axially connected together by the connecting air pipe 5 for axial positioning, and an air inlet channel is formed;

after the connecting ring (3), the corrugated air bag actuator (2), the pneumatic quick plugging interface (4) and the air receiving pipe (5) are installed and fixed, the whole body is cast into a whole by adopting a casting mode, and finally, the pneumatically driven snake-shaped soft robot is formed.

Background

The appearance and rapid development of the soft robot provide a new solution for the problems of safety, flexibility and the like which are difficult to overcome by the traditional robot under the conditions of man-machine interaction and complex special environment. The soft robot mainly uses soft materials such as silicon rubber, hydrogel and the like as a body, and the movement of the soft robot is mainly realized by the deformation of the robot, so that the soft robot has inherent high flexibility, good compliance, excellent adaptability and natural safety interchangeability. The soft robot is divided into rope pulling drive, pneumatic or hydraulic drive, intelligent material drive, chemical reaction drive and the like from the aspect of drive mode, and the pneumatic soft robot is applied to the design of the soft robot at the earliest and is always paid extensive attention and researched by researchers due to the characteristics of light weight, high efficiency, no pollution, strong environmental adaptation and the like. The soft robot with the long and narrow arm type structure has better application prospect in the fields of interventional operation, disaster relief, narrow manufacturing space detection and the like, but is also the technical difficulty of the design and the manufacture of the soft robot.

The key technology of the soft robot is the soft driver, and the Zhongguo beam and the like disclose a stiffness-variable soft serpentine arm in the Chinese patent with the application number of CN201910308264.6, wherein the stiffness-variable soft serpentine arm comprises a plurality of sections of rigid and flexible units which are detachably connected into a whole, and the rigid and flexible units comprise rigid end plates, soft pneumatic artificial muscle groups, super-elastic multi-rod mechanisms and limiting partition plates, so that the flexible bending motion capability can be realized. However, the device can only realize unidirectional movement, and the flexibility is not high enough. Wangsheng et al disclose a "pneumatic multi-bag type soft robot" in chinese patent application No. CN201610153942.2, which can realize movements such as curved surface crawling, but has poor controllability on the direction of the movement.

Disclosure of Invention

The invention provides a pneumatic drive snake-shaped-imitating soft robot aiming at the problems of soft robots in the prior art. The device has a snake-like long and narrow structure, and can realize flexible action with super-redundancy freedom degree. The robot body is made of silicon rubber or other soft elastic materials by casting; a connecting ring structure based on plastic materials (nylon, PLA and the like) is designed, so that radial deformation restraint of the snake-like soft robot, connection of an air bag actuator and air passage switching of the actuator are realized. An axially expandable distributed corrugated air bag actuator structure is designed, flexible bending motion of the snake-like soft robot in space is realized, and the motion performance is good. Compact structure and low cost.

The invention adopts the technical scheme that the pneumatic drive snake-like soft robot consists of a snake-like soft robot body 1, a corrugated air bag actuator 2, a connecting ring 3, a pneumatic quick plug interface 4 and a connecting air pipe 5.

The snake-like soft robot body 1 is a columnar elastic body made of silica gel materials, three rows of connecting holes 101 are machined in the axial direction, each row is provided with M connecting holes, and the three rows of connecting holes are distributed at 120 degrees in the circumferential direction;

the corrugated air bag actuator 2 is composed of a telescopic corrugated air chamber 201 and an air inlet pipe 202; the air inlet pipe 202 is arranged on the side surface of the corrugated air cavity 201; the air inlet pipe 202 is arranged in the connecting hole 101 of the robot body 1, and the corrugated air bag actuator 2 is used for controlling the bending motion of the snake-like soft robot body 1 in the left-right yawing direction and the up-down pitching direction;

the main body of the connecting ring 3 is annular, three fixing clamp sleeves 301 arranged at 120 degrees are arranged on the annular, and each fixing clamp sleeve 301 is provided with a vent hole 302 and an annular connector 303; the connecting ring 3, the fixing clamping sleeve 301, the vent hole 302 and the annular connector 303 are integrally cast; the inner ring of the connecting ring 3 is matched with the snake-shaped-like soft robot main body 1 to realize the radial limit of the snake-shaped-like soft robot; the fixed clamping sleeve 301 is matched with the air inlet pipe 202, so that dislocation with the corrugated air bag brake 2 in the air inlet process is prevented, and air leakage of the air inlet pipe 202 is avoided; both sides of the vent hole 302 are matched with the pneumatic quick plugging interface 4;

the pneumatic quick plugging interface 4 is connected with an air source and the vent hole 302 on the connecting ring; sealing between the vent hole 302 and the gas source is achieved, and gas leakage is prevented;

the connecting air pipe 5 is connected with the pneumatic quick plugging interfaces 4 at two sides of the vent hole 302, and the M connecting rings 3 are axially connected together to be axially positioned and form an air inlet channel;

after the corrugated air bag actuator 2, the connecting ring 3, the pneumatic quick plugging interface 4 and the connecting air pipe are fixed, integral casting forming is carried out, and finally the pneumatic drive snake-shaped-like soft robot is formed.

The pneumatic drive snake-like soft robot has the beneficial effects that the pneumatic drive snake-like soft robot is designed, and the corrugated air bag structure is adopted, so that the multi-degree-of-freedom motion control of the snake-like soft robot is realized. The corrugated air bag actuator structure and the snake-shaped-imitating soft robot main body are integrally formed by adopting a pouring mode, and the manufacturing process is simple and quick. The radial direction of the snake-shaped-like soft robot is limited through the connecting ring, and the corrugated air bag actuator is adopted to control and complete the axial bending motion of the snake-shaped-like soft robot. The multidirectional movement of the snake-like soft robot can be pneumatically driven through air inlet operations in different directions. The snake-shaped-like soft robot has simple and compact structure, convenient manufacture and low cost. The motion performance is good, the control precision is high, and the operability is strong.

Drawings

Fig. 1 is a schematic structural diagram of a pneumatically driven snake-like soft robot according to the present invention. Wherein, 1-imitative snakelike software robot body, 3-go-between, 5-connection trachea.

FIG. 2 is a schematic view of the main structure of the snake-like soft robot of the present invention. The robot comprises a flexible robot body 1, an imitated snake-shaped flexible robot body, and a connecting hole 101.

Figure 3 is a schematic view of a connector ring assembly according to the present invention. 2-corrugated gasbag actuator, 201-corrugated gas chamber, 202-intake pipe, 3-go-between, 301-fixed cutting ferrule, 302-air vent, 303-annular connector, 4-pneumatic quick plug interface.

FIG. 4 is a schematic diagram of a normal state configuration of the bellows airbag actuator of the present invention.

Fig. 5 is a schematic view of a connection ring according to the present invention. 3-connecting ring, 301-fixed cutting sleeve, 302-vent hole, 303-annular connector.

Detailed Description

The embodiments of the present invention will be described in detail below with reference to the accompanying drawings and technical solutions.

A pneumatic drive snake-like soft robot, as shown in figure 1. The robot consists of an imitated snake-shaped soft robot main body 1, a corrugated air bag actuator 2, a connecting ring 3, a pneumatic quick plugging interface 4 and a connecting air pipe 5. Wherein, a section of snakelike software robot main part 1 is column elastomer, and is 186mm long, and the external diameter is 40mm, and the internal diameter is 20 mm. The snake-imitating soft robot body 1 is embedded with three corrugated air bag actuators 2 at intervals of 120 degrees in the circumferential direction, and is embedded with nine corrugated air bag actuators 2 in parallel in the axial direction, and the total number of the corrugated air bag actuators 2 is 27.

As shown in fig. 2, the snake-like soft robot main body 1 is made of a silica gel material, has high elasticity and ductility, and has 27 connecting holes 101. When nine bellows airbag actuators 2 in the same row are inflated by an air source, the nine bellows airbag actuators 2 elongate in the axial direction as the air pressure increases. At this time, the columnar elastic bodies 1 positioned on the same side can also deform along the axial direction, and the other two sides basically have no deformation amount, so that the columnar elastic bodies are finally bent and deformed along a certain direction, and the snake-like soft robot is pushed to bend in various environments. The motion control of the columnar elastic body in two degrees of freedom of the right and left and the pitch can be realized by three bellows type air bag actuators 2 in the circumferential direction.

The bellows airbag actuator 2 is shown in fig. 3 and 4. The bellows type air bag actuator 2 is composed of a bellows-shaped air chamber 201 and an air intake pipe 202. The corrugated air cavity 201 is of a telescopic rectangular structure, the section of the corrugated air cavity is rectangular, the length of the corrugated air cavity is 6mm, and the height of the corrugated air cavity is 8 mm. The air inlet pipe 202 is positioned on the side of the corrugated air cavity 201, is embedded into the connecting hole 101 and extends out of the snake-like soft robot main body 1. When an external air source is used for introducing air into the corrugated air cavity 201 through the air inlet pipe, the corrugated air cavity 201 can only extend and expand along the axial direction of the snake-shaped soft robot main body 1, so that the snake-shaped soft robot main body 1 continuously extends and deforms in the axial direction, and deformation and deterioration are generated on two sides of the snake-shaped soft robot main body 1 due to the fact that only one side extends and deforms, and therefore the phenomenon that the snake-shaped soft robot main body 1 bends and moves appears.

The structure of the connecting ring 3 is shown in fig. 3 and 5, three fixing clamping sleeves 301 are arranged on the connecting ring 3, and each fixing clamping sleeve is provided with a vent hole 302 and an annular connector 303. The manufacturing method of the connecting ring 3 is that firstly, an integral mould containing the fixing clamping sleeve 301, the vent hole 302 and the annular connector 303 is manufactured, and the connecting ring 3 is integrally formed through a pouring mode. Each fixing clamping sleeve 301 is connected with the air inlet pipe 202 through an annular connector 303, and two ends of the vent hole 302 are respectively connected and matched with the pneumatic quick plugging interface 4 to form a closed channel for providing an air inlet channel of an air source.

One connecting ring 3 is circumferentially connected to three corrugated airbag actuators 2, and a total of nine connecting rings 3 connect 27 corrugated airbag actuators 2. The connecting ring 3 is used for radially limiting the columnar elastic body 1, and unnecessary deformation of the columnar elastic body in the radial direction is avoided.

The pneumatic quick plugging interface 4 is a 4mm standard part with the model of PU-4, one end of the pneumatic quick plugging interface 4 is connected with the annular connector 303 and matched with the air inlet pipe 202, and the other end of the pneumatic quick plugging interface 4 is connected with the connecting air pipe 5 to form a pneumatic channel.

After the corrugated air bag actuator 2, the connecting ring 3 and the pneumatic quick plug interface 4 are fixed, the connecting ring 3, the snake-shaped-like soft robot main body 1 and the corrugated air bag actuator 2 are integrally cast and formed in a casting mode, and finally the pneumatically-driven snake-shaped-like soft robot is formed. The whole device has the advantages of compact structure, convenient manufacture, good motion performance, higher control precision and strong operability.