Festo arm

This is an interesting approach to the design of a robot arm, but I don't think that it's entirely novel. I've read of other designs from previous decades which used a similar sort of idea with many joints arranged in a snake-like fashion.



There are a few reasons why designs like this havn't been successful in the past. The main one is that the control of an arm with this design, in terms of the forward and inverse kinematics, is going to be significantly more difficult than for conventional robot arm designs. The fact that it's pneumatically driven also adds to the complexity of the control problem, since the rate of expansion of the various chambers may not be known precisely and may change over time as the system ages. Also, as I've experienced for myself, pneumatic actuators can be very noisy, to an extent where the noise problem alone might exclude many possible applications outside of a controlled factory environment. To really be practical the compressor needs to be small, capable of being run from a battery, and make as little noise as possible.

However, if the above problems can be adequately solved, then perhaps this sort of design will become much more popular. The all-plastic design has the advantage of minimising weight, which means that the arm can be longer than would otherwise be possible, and the compliant nature of combined plastics and pneumatics should mean that this design will be fairly safe to use in close proximity to people. Also a plastic arm is likely to have a much lower cost of manufacture than one traditionally made from metal, especially if it can be printed with something like a rapid prototyper.