This documentation page is oriented towards getting a working circuitry and experimental setup for a tendon driven actuator soft-robot.

Red text is for unfinished topics that need to be discussed.

How to set up a tendon-driven soft actuator with Arduino, servo motors, and fishing line?

1. General structure design

• Robot body: robot's flexible backbone

  

  • 3D-printed Rigid PLA segment

  • 3D-printed flexible TPU segment

  • Soft silicone tube (Dragon Skin 10, EcoFlex)

• Cable routing: 2–4 tendons threaded through small PTFE tubes along the wall.

  • Opposing tendons bend the body left/right or up/down.
  • Like agonist-antagonist pair muscle

  

• Anchoring: tie tendon ends through embedded eyelets at the distal tip.

Example ：

PLA-Based backbone

Kaidi Zhu, Tim C. Lueth, Yilun Sun, Design of FDM-printable tendon-driven continuum robots using a serial S-shaped backbone structure, Biomimetic Intelligence and Robotics, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2025,

Silicone Body