Abstract

Soft robots can effectively mimic human hand interface characteristics and facilitate collaborative operations with humans in a safe manner. This dissertation research concerns the design and fabrication of a low cost variable stiffness structure for applications in compliant robotic fingers. A conceptual design of a compact multi-layer structure is proposed for realizing variable stiffness, when applied to underactuated fingers of an
anthropomorphic robotic hand. The proposed design comprises thin material layers with clearance that permits a progressive hardening feature while grasping and added design flexibility and tuning of the fingers’ compliance. The design permits stiffness variations in a passive manner in the soft contact regions. The design is realized to ensure ease of scalability and cost-effective fabrication by the ’Additive Manufacturing (AM)’/3D-printing technology. Both the multi-layer structures and the fingers could be fabricated as a single entity, and from a single base material with relatively low elastic modulus. The proposed design also exhibits finite degrees-of-freedom representative of the human finger - The feasibility of the design and its manufacturability are verified through prototype fabrication using a readily available 3D-printing material, namely; 'Thermoplastic PolyUrethane (TPU)' with Young’s Modulus of 25MPa. The chosen material permitted low stiffness of the multi-layer structure in the contact interface under relatively small deformations, while ensuring sufficient rigidity on the non-contact regions of the finger.

A finite element (FE) model is formulated considering 3D tetrahedral elements and a nodal-normal contact detection method together with the augmented Lagrange formulation. The model is analyzed to determine the force-displacement characteristics of the structure subject to linearly increasing compressive load, under the assumption of low interface friction. A simplified analytical model of the multi-layer structure is also formulated considering essential boundary and support conditions for each individual layer. The model revealed progressive hardening characteristics of the multilayer structure during compression due to sequential jamming of individual layers. The force-displacement characteristics of the design could thus be varied by varying the multi-layer structure parameters, such as number of layers, thickness of individual layers, material properties, and clearance between the successive layers. It is shown that the simplified analytical model could provide reasonably good estimate of the force-deflection properties of the structure in a computationally efficient manner. The analytical model is subsequently used to investigate the influences of variations in the multilayer structure parameters in a computationally efficient manner. It is shown that the proposed design offers superior tuning flexibility to realize desired force-displacement characteristics of the structure for developing scalable anthropomorphic robotic fingers of a compliant robotic hand, in addition to the cost-effective manufacturability.