Pneumatic Soft Robots: Challenges and Benefits

Abstract

In the field of robotics, soft robots have been showing great potential in the areas of medical care, education, service, rescue, exploration, detection, and wearable devices due to their inherently high flexibility, good compliance, excellent adaptability, and natural and safe interactivity. Pneumatic soft robots occupy an essential position among soft robots because of their features such as lightweight, high efficiency, non-pollution, and environmental adaptability. Thanks to its mentioned benefits, increasing research interests have been attracted to the development of novel types of pneumatic soft robots in the last decades. This article aims to investigate the solutions to develop and research the pneumatic soft robot. This paper reviews the status and the main progress of the recent research on pneumatic soft robots. Furthermore, a discussion about the challenges and benefits of the recent advancement of the pneumatic soft robot is provided.

Keywords

• soft robotics
• soft pneumatic actuators
• soft components
• control systems
• prototyping