Fast Untethered Soft Robotic Crawler with Elastic Instability

High-speed locomotion of animals gives them tremendous advantages in exploring, hunting, and escaping from predators in varying environments. Enlightened by the fast-running gait of mammals like cheetahs and wolves, we designed and fabricated a single-servo-driving untethered soft robot that is capable of galloping at a speed of 313 mm/s or 1.56 body length per second (BL/s), 5.2 times and 2.6 times faster than the reported fastest predecessors in mm/s and BL/s, respectively, in literature. An in-plane prestressed hair clip mechanism (HCM) made up of semi-rigid materials like plastic is used as the supporting chassis, the compliant spine, and the muscle force amplifier of the robot at the same time, enabling the robot to be rapid and strong. The influence of factors including actuation frequency, substrates, tethering/untethering, and symmetric/asymmetric actuation is explored with experiments. Based on previous work, this paper further demonstrated the potential of HCM in addressing the speed problem of soft robots

Design, Actuation, and Functionalization of Untethered Soft Magnetic Robots with Life-Like Motions: A Review

Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and can perform sophisticated tasks. Notably, soft magnetic robots exhibit unparalleled advantages among numerous soft robots (such as untethered control, rapid response, and high safety), and have made remarkable progress in small-scale manipulation tasks and biomedical applications. Despite the promising potential, soft magnetic robots are still in their infancy and require significant advancements in terms of fabrication, design principles, and functional development to be viable for real-world applications. Recent progress shows that bionics can serve as an effective tool for developing soft robots. In light of this, the review is presented with two main goals: (i) exploring how innovative bioinspired strategies can revolutionize the design and actuation of soft magnetic robots to realize various life-like motions; (ii) examining how these bionic systems could benefit practical applications in small-scale solid/liquid manipulation and therapeutic/diagnostic-related biomedical fields

SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ACTUATING SOFT ROBOTIC ACTUATORS

Systems and methods for providing a soft robot is provided. In one system , a robotic device includes a flexible body having a fluid chamber, where a portion of the flexible body includes an elastically extensible material and a portion of the flexible body is strain limiting relative to the elastically extensible material. The robotic device can further include a pressurizing inlet in fluid communication with the fluid chamber, and a pressurizing device in fluid communication with the pressurizing inlet, the pressurizing device including a reaction chamber configured to accommodate a gas producing chemical reaction for providing pressurized gas to the pressurizing inlet

Wirelessly-Controlled Untethered Piezoelectric Planar Soft Robot Capable of Bidirectional Crawling and Rotation

Electrostatic actuators provide a promising approach to creating soft robotic sheets, due to their flexible form factor, modular integration, and fast response speed. However, their control requires kilo-Volt signals and understanding of complex dynamics resulting from force interactions by on-board and environmental effects. In this work, we demonstrate an untethered planar five-actuator piezoelectric robot powered by batteries and on-board high-voltage circuitry, and controlled through a wireless link. The scalable fabrication approach is based on bonding different functional layers on top of each other (steel foil substrate, actuators, flexible electronics). The robot exhibits a range of controllable motions, including bidirectional crawling (up to ~0.6 cm/s), turning, and in-place rotation (at ~1 degree/s). High-speed videos and control experiments show that the richness of the motion results from the interaction of an asymmetric mass distribution in the robot and the associated dependence of the dynamics on the driving frequency of the piezoelectrics. The robot's speed can reach 6 cm/s with specific payload distribution.Comment: Accepted to the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

Towards enduring autonomous robots via embodied energy.

Autonomous robots comprise actuation, energy, sensory and control systems built from materials and structures that are not necessarily designed and integrated for multifunctionality. Yet, animals and other organisms that robots strive to emulate contain highly sophisticated and interconnected systems at all organizational levels, which allow multiple functions to be performed simultaneously. Herein, we examine how system integration and multifunctionality in nature inspires a new paradigm for autonomous robots that we call Embodied Energy. Whereas most untethered robots use batteries to store energy and power their operation, recent advancements in energy-storage techniques enable chemical or electrical energy sources to be embodied directly within the structures and materials used to create robots, rather than requiring separate battery packs. This perspective highlights emerging examples of Embodied Energy in the context of developing autonomous robots

Using Explosions to Power a Soft Robot

This manuscript describes the use of explosions to power a soft robot—one composed solely of organic elastomers (e.g., silicones). The robot has three pneumatic actuators (pneu-nets) in a tripedal configuration. Explosion of a stoichiometric mixture of methane and oxygen within the microchannels making up the actuators produced hot gas that rapidly inflated the pneu-nets, and caused the robot to launch itself vertically from a flat surface (e.g., to jump). A soft flap embedded in the pneu-net acted as the valve of a passive exhaust system, and allowed multiple sequential actuations. The flame and temperature increase from the explosions are short-lived, and do not noticeably damage the robots over dozens of actuation cycles.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

eViper: A Scalable Platform for Untethered Modular Soft Robots

Soft robots present unique capabilities, but have been limited by the lack of scalable technologies for construction and the complexity of algorithms for efficient control and motion, which depend on soft-body dynamics, high-dimensional actuation patterns, and external/on-board forces. This paper presents scalable methods and platforms to study the impact of weight distribution and actuation patterns on fully untethered modular soft robots. An extendable Vibrating Intelligent Piezo-Electric Robot (eViper), together with an open-source Simulation Framework for Electroactive Robotic Sheet (SFERS) implemented in PyBullet, was developed as a platform to study the sophisticated weight-locomotion interaction. By integrating the power electronics, sensors, actuators, and batteries on-board, the eViper platform enables rapid design iteration and evaluation of different weight distribution and control strategies for the actuator arrays, supporting both physics-based modeling and data-driven modeling via on-board automatic data-acquisition capabilities. We show that SFERS can provide useful guidelines for optimizing the weight distribution and actuation patterns of the eViper to achieve the maximum speed or minimum cost-of-transportation (COT).Comment: 8 pages, 21 figures, accepted by IROS 202