Towards honeycomb pneunets robots

In recent years, Soft Robotics becomes a research hotspot. A soft robot is usually made of elastic materials, and thus has better adaptability and safety to the environment than a rigid robot. These advantages offer us a new opportunity to attack some fundamental challenges faced by traditional robots. Most of previous studies about soft robots focus on clarifying the deformation characteristics of the flexible materials used. In order to pursue a large expansion rate, the stiffness of the soft materials is usually very low, which brings a consequence that these soft robots are too soft to maintain its shape or to resist external forces. Inspired by the honeycomb structure, this paper proposes a honeycomb pneumatic network (HPN) robot, which consists of several pneumatic units. We put forward a force analysis model of a pneumatic unit and a kinematics model of honeycomb pneumatic network. Based on these models, we study the relationships between the air pressure, external force and geometrical shape through simulation. The experimental results showed that the excellent expansion rate and flexibility can be achieved in the HPN robot.