Pneumatic Tentacle
(Work in Progress)
Background/Motivation
Octopus tentacles are really good at adapting to many environments. I'd like to make a tentacle-style actuator with fine motor control.
Design Process
Most approaches to constructing tentacle actuators use electric motors attached to a string. However, this does not reflect how actual tentacles (or hydrostats) are actually constructed and therefore do not take advantage of the properties of real tentacles. I want to use McKibben (air muscles) to act as muscle fibers in this tentacle since they exhibit non-linear behavior similar to human muscles.
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The tentacles consist of "joints" comprised of three muscle fibers to control the angle of each joint. Right now, I was able to control three joint sections. I also built a joint stick controller to control the angle of each joint.
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Will add more detail later.
Results
I also experimented with Unity to make a simulation of a many-jointed tentacle. I used the ML reinforcement learning features to develop a stabilization algorithm for this tentacle