ET Arm: Highly Compliant Elephant-Trunk Continuum Manipulator

摘要

This paper proposes a novel elephant-trunk continuum manipulator, called ET Arm. ET Arm is composed of 2 muscle segments. Each of the muscle segments is composed of elastic skeletons, an artificial skin and 3 artificial muscles. In one muscle, a motor mounted to a base is connected to a flexible rod, and the end of the rod is connected to an end disk by screw driving. When one motor rotates, the distance from the base to the end disk will change, the arm bends. The experimental results show that ET Arm is valid and it can bend to any point in its workspace, which is useful for many applications.