Design and kinematic analysis of an elephant-trunk-like robot with shape memory alloy actuators

In this paper, a new elephant-trunk-like robot with shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators was designed using a modular method. It consisted of a series of 2-degree of freedom (DOF) joint modules and showed the merits of light weight, compact structure, and flexibility. For each joint module, a sensor module based on MPU6050 chip was used to measure the pose of the end-effector in the form of Yaw-Pitch-Row Euler angles. Based on a piecewise-constant-curvature assumption, the kinematic analyses for the one-module robot and n-module robot were performed and developed. Experimental results obtained using the one-module elephant-trunk-like robot demonstrates the efficiency of the kinematic model.