Design and Analysis of Flexible Joints for Robots Based on Module Cells.

In this paper, we propose a flexible robotic arm for robot structures. The robotic arm consists of an array of modular elements and is articulated by rods. Moreover, the module element is structured by double-layer hexagon, which is offsetted part of the distance from a hexagon. Furthermore, the working space and motion characteristics of the flexible robotic arm were analyzed. The analysis results show that the flexible manipulator based on the modular element has better flexibility and can realize different working spaces according to the different hinges of the modular units. It is worth noting that the design strategy based on the modular unit flexible manipulator expands the design ideas of the flexible robot mechanism, especially in the application fields with high requirements for robot flexibility, such as detection in narrow and long spaces and unstructured environments.