Design and closed-loop control of a tri-layer Polypyrrole based telescopic soft robot

A novel structure of a 2 DoF telescopic soft robot using a tri-layer Polypyrrole (PPy) soft micro-actuator with deployment is presented in this paper. The kinematic model is introduced and the Position Based Visual Servo (PBVS) control with path-planning and obstacle avoidance algorithms is developed. A prototype is presented and the control schemes are validated experimentally. A satisfactory accuracy with a submillimetric positioning error is obtained namely 287.6 microns for a circular path and 210 microns for obstacle avoidance.