Continuous and large-scale: ELEANOR, the soft architected arm inspired by the elephant trunk
This work addresses the challenge of creating large-scale, continuous soft manipulators for adaptable grasping, offering a biomimetic design that emulates the elephant trunk's structural continuity and dynamic properties.
The authors present ELEANOR, an 85 cm soft continuum robot arm inspired by the elephant trunk, which uses 3D printing and tendon-driven actuation to achieve whole-body grasping of diverse objects, demonstrating elephant-like movements without prescribed behaviors.
The elephant trunk is a dexterous and versatile manipulator whose performance is still unmatched in robotics. In previous works, modularity was prioritized and relatively small-scale continuum robots were built. We take the natural proboscis of the *Loxodonta africana* species as a model and propose a different design approach which favors structural continuity and dynamic properties that plausibly emulate those of the natural trunk, while conferring high adaptability to the environment and humans. Instead of targeting prescribed behaviors, we show that a biomimetic design based on the macroscopic properties of the natural system enables elephant-like movements and grasping. We build by 3D printing an 85 cm long, compliant, tapered, volumetrically tessellated continuum arm, which is combined with tendon-driven actuation mimicking the longitudinal and oblique muscles of the natural model. We demonstrate whole-body grasping of objects having different shapes and dimensions and discuss a comparison to the biological trunk highlighting aspects of both biology and robotics.