Design and Control of a Tunable-Stiffness Coiled-Spring Actuator

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Lab Papers (GRASP)
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GRASP
tunable-stiffness
actuator design
modeling
manipulator
soft robotics
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Robotics
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Abstract

We propose a novel design for a lightweight and compact tunable stiffness actuator capable of stiffness changes up to 20x. The design is based on the concept of a coiled spring, where changes in the number of layers in the spring change the bulk stiffness in a near-linear fashion. We present an elastica nested rings model for the deformation of the proposed actuator and empirically verify that the designed stiffness-changing spring abides by this model. Using the resulting model, we design a physical prototype of the tunable-stiffness coiled-spring actuator and discuss the effect of design choices on the resulting achievable stiffness range and resolution. In the future, this actuator design could be useful in a wide variety of soft robotics applications, where fast, controllable, and local stiffness change is required over a large range of stiffnesses.

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2023-05-29
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Lab Papers (GRASP)
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2023-05-18T04:55:42.000
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@ARTICLE{tunable_stiffness_spring, author={Misra, Shivangi and Mitchell, Mason and Chen, Rongqian and Sung, Cynthia}, JOURNAL={IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)}, title={Design and Control of a Tunable-Stiffness Coiled-Actuator}, year={2023}}
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