Design of Flexible Mechanism Including Wire Routing of Bi-Directional Helix for Improvement of Delay Time Performance

Abstract

This paper proposes a wire routing of bidirectional helix for design of flexible mechanism applicable to several application areas. When the flexible cylinder body is soft and the driving wires passing through helically arranged lumens of the cylinder are pulled by a large tension, the configuration of the continuum mechanism tends to be distorted in a helical pattern. In this paper, a new helical arrangement of wires is proposed in which half of the total number of wires rotates clockwise and the other half rotates counterclockwise to solve this phenomenon. The proposed continuum mechanism is constructed and compared with the continuum mechanism that includes the straight pattern of the wire lumen by measuring the delay time. The results of delay time is analyzed and the effectiveness of the continuum mechanism including the bidirectional pattern in wire arrangement is verified.