Robotic arms are essential to modern industries, however, their adaptability to unstructured environments remains limited. Soft robotic arms, particularly those actuated pneumatically, offer greater adaptability in unstructured environments and enhanced safety for human-robot interaction. However, current pneumatic soft arms are constrained by limited degrees of freedom, precision, payload capacity, and reliance on bulky external pressure regulators. In this work, a novel pneumatically driven rigid-soft hybrid arm, ``UMArm'', is presented. The shortcomings of pneumatically actuated soft arms are addressed by densely integrating high-force-to-weight-ratio, self-regulated McKibben actuators onto a lightweight rigid spine structure. The modified McKibben actuators incorporate valves and controllers directly inside, eliminating the need for individual pressure lines and external regulators, significantly reducing system weight and complexity. Full untethered operation, high payload capacity, precision, and directionally tunable compliance are achieved by the UMArm. Portability is demonstrated through a wearable assistive arm experiment, and versatility is showcased by reconfiguring the system into an inchworm robot. The results of this work show that the high-degree-of-freedom, external-regulator-free pneumatically driven arm systems like the UMArm possess great potential for real-world unstructured environments.

翻译：机械臂在现代工业中不可或缺，但其在非结构化环境中的适应性仍显不足。软体机械臂，尤其是气动驱动的类型，在非结构化环境中展现出更强的适应能力，并提升了人机交互的安全性。然而，当前的气动软体臂受限于自由度有限、精度不足、负载能力较弱以及对笨重外部压力调节器的依赖。本研究提出了一种新型气动驱动的刚柔混合臂“UMArm”。通过将高力重比、自调节的McKibben驱动器密集集成于轻质刚性脊柱结构上，解决了气动软体臂的上述缺陷。改进的McKibben驱动器将阀门和控制器直接内置于内部，无需独立压力管路和外部调节器，显著降低了系统重量与复杂度。UMArm实现了完全无束缚操作、高负载能力、精确控制及方向可调的柔顺性。通过可穿戴辅助臂实验验证了其便携性，并通过重构为尺蠖机器人展示了系统的多功能性。本研究结果表明，如UMArm这类具有高自由度且无需外部调节器的气动驱动臂系统，在现实非结构化环境中具有巨大应用潜力。