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.

尽管鞭是一种已经使用了数千年的通用工具，但对其动态行为的研究却很少。随着现代技术的进步，设计和制造软体机器人鞭子已变得可行。本文提出了对机器人鞭的建模和实验测试的研究。使用伪刚体模型（PRBM）对机器人鞭进行建模。就像多链接摆一样，PRBM由许多伪刚性链接和伪旋转关节组成。由于其大量的自由度（DOF）和继承的欠驱动，该机器人鞭表现出突出的瞬态混沌行为。特别地，取决于初始驱动力，混乱可能迟早开始，但由于重力和空气阻尼而消失。通过实验验证了该动态模型。有趣的是，在相同的作用力下，机器人鞭产生的速度是刚性鞭的3倍以上，加速度高达其刚性的43倍。这为机器人鞭打提供了一些潜在的应用，例如鞭打，包裹和抓取。这项研究还有助于开发其他涉及非线性动力学的软体机器人。