Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Zhang, Yifan
• Yang, Dezhi
• Yan, Peinan
• Zhou, Peiwei
• Zou, Jiang
• Gu, Guoying

Titel

Inchworm Inspired Multimodal Soft Robots With Crawling, Climbing, and Transitioning Locomotion

Ist Teil von

• IEEE transactions on robotics, 2022-06, Vol.38 (3), p.1806-1819

Ort / Verlag

New York: IEEE

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Although many soft robots, capable of crawling or climbing, have been well developed, integrating multimodal locomotion into a soft robot for transitioning between crawling and climbing still remains elusive. In this work, we present a class of inchworm-inspired multimodal soft crawling-climbing robots (SCCRs) that can achieve crawling, climbing, and transitioning between horizontal and vertical planes. Inspired by the inchworm's multimodal locomotion, which depends on the "<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Omega</tex-math></inline-formula>" deformation of the body and controllable friction force of feet, we develop the SCCR by 1) three pneumatic artificial muscles based body designed to produce "<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Omega</tex-math></inline-formula>" deformation; 2) two negative pressure suckers adopted to generate controllable friction forces. Then a simplified kinematic model is developed to characterize the kinematic features of the SCCRs. Lastly, a control strategy is proposed to synchronously control the "<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\Omega</tex-math></inline-formula>" deformation and sucker friction forces for multimodal locomotion. The experimental results demonstrate that the SCCR can move at a maximum speed of 21 mm/s (0.11 body length/s) on horizontal planes and 15 mm/s (0.079 body length/s) on vertical walls. Furthermore, the SCCR can work in confined spaces, carry a payload of 500 g (about 15 times the self-weight) on horizontal planes or 20 g on vertical walls, and move in aquatic environments.