Design and Experiment of Soft Actuator with Rope-Driven Magnetic Variable Stiffness

Compared with rigid structure actuator, soft actuator has higher degree of freedom, but its load output capacity is insufficient. In order to further improve its load capacity, a fast variable stiffness rope-driven soft actuator based on magnetorheological elastomer is proposed, and the theoretical mathematical model of deformation and stiffness of variable stiffness soft actuator is established. The experimental results show that the designed and developed magnetorheological variable stiffness soft actuator can achieve multi-level variable stiffness under rope-driving and the effect of the magnetic field of the electromotive force, and the maximum stiffness can be improved by about 51%, and the response time of stiffness adjustment is less than 0.5s. The end load experiment of the soft actuator shows that the load capacity of the soft actuator under 40mT magnetic field is 1.51 times that of the soft actuator without magnetic field.