  The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven
a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable
stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies,
the robotic arm design of this project has a modular structure, which means the
length of the robotic arm can be adjusted by addition of extra arm
modules/segments to the existing robotic prototype. Furthermore, the new arm
prototype supports motion within a 3-dimensional space. To achieve the goals,
the design and fabrication for the variable stiffness robotic arm with
compliant main structure and layer jamming mechanism has already been finished.
Design and fabrication of the connector has also been finished to integrate
several link modules into one robotic arm with multiple segments. The actuator
located at the base of the arm has already been designed and tested. Finally, a
stiffness test of one arm segment was conducted to verifying the load carrying
capacity of the variable stiffness robotic arm, then the stiffness ratio of the
layer jammed structure was calculated to analyze the stiffness improvement
compared with unstiffened soft robot.
