Modeling and Experimental Validation of the Chaotic Behavior of a Robot Whip

Although the whip is a common tool that has been used for thousands of years, there have been very few studies on its dynamic behavior. With the advance of modern technology, designing and building soft- body robot whips has become feasible. This paper presents a study on the modeling and experimental testing of a robot whip. The robot whip is modeled using a Pseudo-Rigid-Body Model (PRBM). The PRBM consists of a number of pseudo-rigid-links and pseudo-revolute-joints just like a multi-linkage pendulum. Because of its large number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and inherited underactuation, the robot whip exhibits prominent transient chaotic behavior. In particular, depending on the initial driving force, the chaos may start sooner or later, but will die down because of the gravity and air damping. The dynamic model is validated by experiments. It is interesting to note that with the same amount of force, the robot whip can generate a velocity more than 3 times and an acceleration up to 43 times faster than that of its rigid counterpart. This gives the robot whip some potential applications, such as whipping, wrapping and grabbing. This study also helps to develop other soft-body robots that involve nonlinear dynamics.