Kinematics Research of Origami Pneumatic Flexible Arm

Origami structures can unfold two-dimensional planes into three-dimensional structures with different geometries and mechanical properties, allowing for flexible deformation with multiple degrees of freedom. Pneumatic drive is widely used because of its fast response, low price and no pollution. In this paper, an origami flexible arm driven by pneumatic pouch motor is designed, and the kinematics of the flexible arm is studied. The traditional D-H method is improved to analyze the relationship between the spatial variables of the flexible arm joints to obtain the kinematic equations. There are infinitely many kinematics inverse solutions of the flexible arm. Through geometric analysis, the flexible arm is divided into two groups of subspaces, and genetic algorithm is used to solve its kinematics inverse solution. The modeling and simulation of the flexible arm in Matlab is performed to verify the correctness of the flexible arm model, and the Monte Carlo method is used to depict the workspace of the flexible arm end-effector for the practical application of the flexible arm. Through the prototype experiment, the correctness of the kinematics model and the feasibility of the kinematics solution method are verified.