A Hybrid Soft Actuator Inspired by Grass-Spike: Design Approach, Dynamic Model, and Applications

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present in this paper an interesting concept of soft actuator inspired by grass-spike. The idea is clever and the implementation is nice.

The paper present the work in coherent way, reporting reasonably relevant state of the art. The innovative contribution of the work is clear and sufficient to justify the publication.

The paper is clearly written, and though from a technical point of view. Experimental part is fine and the demonstrators relevant for the scope.

I cannot find any major problem or issue, just a can suggest to expand a little the state of the art, including (if any) some more relevant work close to the proposed solution, since the actual state of the art is a little too generically focused on soft actuation mechanism, and maybe to compare the solution with similar ones in term of performances. 

I think that the paper will be suitable for publication  after a little revising the state of the art.

Author Response

Please refer to the attached file. Thank you for your great regard.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript presents the bio-mimetic design approach and dynamic models for a hybrid soft actuator (HAS) inspired by grass-spike as well as a hybrid soft actuator module (HSAM). The experiments were performed to estimate a friction coefficient and a damping effect by system identification process. The estimated parameters were employed to replicate the real measurement by simulation, and the simulation results confirmed that they could be replicated successfully. Two potential applications – elbow manipulation and robot hand grasping were introduced to substantiate the feasibility of the HSA and the HSAM and both were performed successfully. The work described in this manuscript is of sufficient novelty, the topic is of great interest for Modeling, Simulation and Control of Soft Robotics. The following points should be addressed before publication:

 

1. In Page 1, line 21, the authors mentioned “invented a Stickbot [1].”, while in Reference 1, it should be “Stickybot”, but not “Stickbot”.
2. In Page 2, line 68, the authors mentioned “and the proposed actuator will will be referred……”, there are two “will” here, one should be deleted.
3. In Page 8, line 153, the authors mentioned “measured by a calipers.”, should be “a caliper”.
4. In Page 15, line 300-302, Reference 16, it should be “pp. 1-7” 08-12 September 2014.
5. All the tables (Table.1 in Page 5, Table.2 and Table.3 in Page 11) in this manuscript should use three-line table.

Author Response

Please refer to the attached file. Thank you for your great regard.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf