ModuRo ソフトロボットのためのプロトタイピング環境：ak1ra

Robots, which were traditionally seen mostly in factories, are now becoming commonplace in daily life. On the other hand, conventional hard and powerful robots both become weapons and incite fear when cooperating with humans. The attempt to add softness to the structure, exterior, and actuator of a robot is a soft robot. Soft robots have begun to be applied not only to service robots but also to a wide range of fields such as biomechanics, industry and medical care. On the other hand, soft prototyping has been difficult until now. In this study, we developed a modular robot “ModuRo” equipped with a shape memory alloy, a soft actuators, and proposed smooth prototyping environment for soft robots. We implemented two prototypes of ModuRo, and evaluated the performance as an actuator and performed a usability test on the prototyping of a stuffed soft robot. In the performance evaluation, it was found
that the soft actuator exhibited a stable output. In the usability test, there was no significant difference in the expressive power between the ModuRo system and the existing code base programming, but it was suggested that the work efficiency was improved by using ModuRo.