A Flexible Manipulator Based on Elastic Tube

Abstract

The invention discloses a flexible mechanical arm based on an elastic tube. The flexible mechanical arm comprises a drive mechanism and an arm section mechanism, wherein the arm section mechanism comprises an elastic tube and one or more joint sections which are sequentially connected with one another; each joint section comprises a plurality of joint modules, a plurality of spherical joints and aplurality of ropes; each joint module comprises a flange part and two tapered bulge parts, wherein the two tapered bulge parts are separately arranged at the two sides of the flange part, and the flange part is connected to circular extending parts of the bottoms of the tapered bulge parts at the two sides; the top ends of the two adjacent tapered bulge parts between every two joint modules are hinged through the ball joints; the first ends of the ropes are connected with the drive mechanism, the second ends of the ropes are fixedly connected on the joint modules at the tail ends after passing the through the joint modules in sequence; an elastic tube sleeves outside all joint sections; and the elastic tube is fixedly connected to the flange part of each joint module of each joint sectionseparately. The flexible mechanical arm can solve the axial compression problem, and is very good in flexible bending effect.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to the field of intelligent manipulators, in particular to a flexible manipulator based on elastic tubes. Background technique [0002] The traditional rigid articulated manipulator has a large and heavy structure, a large operating space, and poor flexibility, which greatly restricts its application in a narrow working space environment. Due to the advantages of large length-to-diameter ratio, many degrees of freedom, flexible movements, and strong environmental adaptability, flexible manipulators are easy to flexibly adjust poses, expand workspaces, avoid obstacles, and overcome singularities in narrow spaces. The joints of the flexible robotic arm in the related art adopt a cross universal structure, and the bending angle of the whole arm is obtained by using the bending degree of freedom of the rigid joint. The mass of the rigid joint is relatively heavy, so the whole arm itself is too heavy, and a large driving power is requi...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

The joints of the flexible robotic arm in the related art adopt a cross universal structure, and the bending angle of the whole arm is obtained by using the bending degree of freedom of the rigid joint. The mass of the rigid joint is relatively heavy, so the whole arm itself is too heavy, and a large driving power is required. At the same time, the bending curvature obtained by using the degree of freedom of the rigid joint around the axis is small, and the flexible bending effect of the whole arm is poor; there are also some flexible manipulators made of pure flexible materials, which improve the flexible bending effect of the whole arm, but there is an axial compression problem

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