Testing

At this stage in development, the crucial benchmark the manipulator had to meet was qualitative: it had to be able to repeatedly produce a bending motion similar to what has been demonstrated by the PneuNets actuators. Additionally, it needed to have the capability to bend in two opposite directions.

In early prototypes, the common failure mode was muscle burnout before sufficient bending had occurred, while later, failure would occur as a result of eventual overheating from attempts to repeat the bending motion too quickly after a previous bend. Below is a video of the final prototype's test.

As can be seen, a significant bending motion was able to be repeated four times without the muscle burning out. The prototype met our initial criteria; so, moving forward, we have introduced new benchmarks that we hope to meet soon. In order to obtain a more uniform and predictable bending motion, we want to develop a better way to regulate the position of the muscle so that it is precisely in the middle of the manipulator, avoiding the skewness of the bending seen in the video. Beyond that, our main goal is to fabricate a full robotic system from this manipulator, complete with controls, to fully demonstrate some of its capabilities.