A soft robot capable of simultaneously grasping an object while navigating around an environment

In recent years, the field of Soft Robotics has grown exponentially resulting in a variety of different soft robot designs. A majority of the current soft robots can easily be split into two distinct categories: Navigation and Grasping. Navigation robots alter their body orientation to navigate around an environment. Grasping robots are designed to grasp a variety of unknown objects without damaging said object. However, only a few robots are able to demonstrate both aspects and even fewer robots are able to do both simultaneously. As thus, the goal of this thesis is to create a soft robot that is able to pick up and support an additional payload. This thesis will explore the challenges and difficulties that come with designing such a robot. For this thesis, we chose to simplify the manufacturing process making it easy to create and test different designs. We primarily used Pneumatic Network actuators for the majority of the soft robot. This allowed us to use a layered manufacturing approach to create the full robot. Finally, we split the robot into two main components which have their own purpose, which made it easy to test and design each component. Attached to this thesis are three different supplementary videos. The first one labeled "Walking Gaits" demonstrate how the robot is capable of moving forward. This video is comprised of several sections showing the full robot moving, just the base moving, and the full robot briefly moving as it supports a payload. The second video is labeled "Additional Walking". This video shows how the base can effectively move around a given environment. The final video if called "Grasping Method" which demonstrates the different grasping methods that the full robot uses to pick up objects.2021-06-03T00:00:00

Soft Foam Robot with Caterpillar-Inspired Gait Regimes for Terrestrial Locomotion

Caterpillars are the soft bodied larvae of lepidopteran insects. They have evolved to occupy an extremely diverse range of natural environments and to locomote in complex three-dimensional structures without articulated joint or hydrostatic control. These animals make excellent bio-inspiration for the field of soft robotics because of their diversity and adaptability. In this paper, we present SquMA Bot, a caterpillar-inspired soft robot. The robot\u27s body is primarily composed of a soft viscoelastic foam, and it is actuated using a motor-tendon system. SquMA Bot is able to mimic the inching gait of a caterpillar and can use its flexible body to adapt to a range of environments. This bio-inspired prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of a soft robot as a potential tool for exploring environments too dangerous for humans