A Chameleon Tongue Inspired Shooting Manipulator With Vision-Based Localization and Preying

• Published in: IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 5; no. 3; pp. 4923 - 4930
• Main Authors: Chen, Rui, Chen, Jin-Quan, Sun, Yi, Wu, Li, Guo, Jiang-Long
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.07.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Actuators; Biologically-inspired robot; chameleon tongue; Electron tubes; Force; Gels; Manipulators; Muscles; Polyisobutylene; Robot arms; Skeleton; soft robot; Tofu; Tongue; Vision
• ISSN: 2377-3766; 2377-3766
• DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2020.3005128

Chameleon tongues are extremely rapid, ultra-stretchable, compact, and can capture preys located multi-directionally. Various chameleon tongue inspired shooting manipulators have therefore been developed. Little work, however, has been studied on the multi-directional preying capability of chameleon tongues. This letter aims to present a chameleon tongue inspired fully soft shooting manipulator with the ability of capturing delicate objects in a range of directions. To this end, we present a compact sliding catapult system (SCS) that could enable the manipulator to have ballistic motions and gentle capturing capabilities. The SCS was capable of projecting to a length of 52 cm at the speed of 5.7 m·s -1 , which is comparable to natural chameleon tongues. With viscoelastic gels (Polyisobutylene) attached at the tip, the manipulator can capture various delicate objects, including a leaf (0.20 g), a slice of dried tofu (6.19 g), and a balloon (0.91 g) in a tube. A chameleon inspired vision-based posture alignment platform has been built for multi-position prey capturing and proof-of-concept demonstrations were presented. The chameleon inspired multi-directional prey capturing platform is not only a successful representation of Chameleons' prey capturing strategies but also offers an effective soft robotic manipulator for handling delicate objects in challenging environments.