A First Approach to a Proposal of a Soft Robotic Link Acting as a Neck

This paper has been presented at XXXIX Jornadas de Automática.The purpose of this paper is to design a soft robotic neck prototype with two Degrees of Freedom (DOF) and propose a control system based on a fractional order PD controller (FPD). The neck will be able to perform movements of flexion, extension and lateral bending. To achieve these movements, the design is made based on a cable-driven mechanism, with components easy to manufacture in a 3D printer. Simulations are performed to validate the feasibility of the developed parallel robot prototype and the robustness of the proposed control scheme to mass changes at the tip.The research leading to these results has received funding from the HUMASOFT project, with reference DPI2016-75330-P, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness