Download or read book Design and Modeling of Variable Stiffness and Shape-changing Robots written by Brian Huynh Do and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional rigid-body robots possess fixed morphology and are created for specific functions. This prevents them from adapting to changes in their environment and limits them to carefully controlled man-made settings. Meanwhile, soft robots face their own distinct challenges due to their infinite number of passive degrees of freedom but few controllable degrees of actuation. Robots that adapt their mechanical properties could address these challenges and better assist humans in unstructured environments. This thesis explores the design, modeling, and fabrication of variable stiffness and shape-changing robots. More specifically, it investigates how variable stiffness can be achieved in both soft and rigid systems and then how it can be leveraged to improve performance and enable new capabilities, such as shape change. At the actuator level, I present a multifunctional soft artificial muscle with variable stiffness and damping that can behave like an actuator, brake, or clutch in a simple, compact form factor. At the system level, I leverage variable stiffness to create robots with properties of both soft continuum and rigid serial chain manipulators by enabling inflated-beam robots with dynamically reconfigurable joints. I also demonstrate a simple method for shape change in everting inflated-beam robots by passively applying strain limiting layers. Finally, I present a lightweight, high extension manipulator which uses variable stiffness to enable shape change. Together, these results in design, modeling, and fabrication address key challenges in using variable stiffness to enable new kinds of actuators and robots for human-robot interaction, manipulation, and exploration.