Design Optimization for Large High-Force Soft Robot Manipulators Under Gravitational Loads
2026-08-17 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors address the challenge of making big soft robots that can push or pull hard enough to interact safely with people. They created a way to design the shape of a soft robot arm to make it strong without bending or buckling under its own weight. Their method uses math to find the best design and they tested it on real soft robot arms with air pressure. The results showed their method works well to predict which designs are strong and which produce the most force. This approach helps robot makers decide ahead of time if a type of soft robot can do the job they want at large sizes.
soft roboticspneumatic actuatorsblocking forcerobot limb designbucklinggravitational loadingmanipulatorclosed-form solutionoptimization
Authors
Isara Cholaseuk, Penelope Llibre, Alexa Kyriacou, Audrey Wang, Akua K. Dickson, Ran Jing, Juan C. Pacheco Garcia, Andrew P. Sabelhaus
Abstract
Designing large soft robots capable of generating high forces for physical human-robot interaction remains a significant challenge in soft robotics. Prior work in large soft robots has focused on proof-of-concept prototypes, and no systematic framework exists for determining the suitability of a design paradigm for a desired task. This manuscript introduces a method for optimizing the geometry of a soft robot limb, maximizing its blocking force subject to an anti-bucking constraint under its own gravitational loading. We demonstrate that an explicit solution exists to the proposed optimization problem under certain assumptions. Experiments with three geometries of a large, soft, pneumatically-actuated manipulator demonstrate that the method correctly predicts which designs meet constraints and which produces the largest end-effector forces. This method, with its closed-form solution, can allow designers to determine a-priori if an intended class of soft manipulators is an appropriate choice for physical interaction at large size scales.