PneuBot - A Soft Robotic Link

With the advancement in technology, robots are being introduced in most of the production processes to improve the production efficiency. Due to the increasing adoption of robots in industries, the concept of human-robot collaboration has seen an uprising trend where humans and robots work together in a shared workspace such as Industry 5.0 raising concerns about human safety. Collaborative robots known as Cobots are used in industries for this purpose where the robots and the humans work side to side. A higher scale of research has been carried out in the field of optimizing the cobots to provide a safer environment for humans which mainly focuses on accident prevention. Even though the cobots provide a safer environment, the possibility of a robot colliding with humans is still present based on different cobots techniques. This collision would have a lesser importance if the humans feels it as a normal touch. Thus the main idea which is mainly focussed on, in this paper, is to replace the rigid robot links with a soft robot link as the impact during collision is under the tolerable limit for humans. A self-developed soft robot link which uses air as the media for structural support was used. Therefore, a detailed description of the concept of PneuBot and a comparative study on the impact caused by the existing cobots with rigid links along with the force impact of the self-developed robot soft link will be discussed in this paper. A universal robot 5e will be used as a power and force limiting cobot.