Design and Control of a Tunable-Stiffness Coiled-Spring Actuator

TL;DR

A lightweight, compact actuator that changes stiffness by up to 20× using a coiled spring: changing the number of layers in the coil changes the bulk stiffness in a near-linear fashion.

Key contributions:

• An elastica nested-rings model of the actuator’s deformation, empirically verified on the fabricated spring.
• A physical prototype with design guidance on the achievable stiffness range and resolution.
• A building block for soft robots that need fast, controllable, local stiffness change over a large range.

Learn more

Design details and hardware are documented on the project page.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{misra2023design,
  title={Design and control of a tunable-stiffness coiled-spring actuator},
  author={Misra, Shivangi and Mitchell, Mason and Chen, Rongqian and Sung, Cynthia},
  booktitle={2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages={634--640},
  year={2023},
  organization={IEEE}
}