Design of a Biologically Inspired Water-Walking Robot Powered by Artificial Muscle

Abstract

The agile and power-efficient locomotion of a water strider has inspired many water-walking devices. These bioinspired water strider robots generally adopt a DC motor to create a sculling trajectory of the driving leg. These robots are, thus, inevitably heavy with many supporting legs decreasing the velocity of the robots. There have only been a few attempts to employ smart materials despite their advantages of being lightweight and having high power densities. This paper proposes an artificial muscle-based water-walking robot capable of moving forward and turning with four degrees of freedom. A compliant amplified shape memory alloy actuator (CASA) used to amplify the strain of a shape memory alloy wire enables a wide sculling motion of the actuation leg with only four supporting legs to support the entire weight of the robot. Design parameters to increase the actuation strain of the actuator and to achieve a desired swing angle (80°) are analyzed. Finally, experiments to measure the forward speed and angular velocities of the robot are carried out to compare with other robots. The robot weighs only 0.236 g and has a maximum and average speed of 1.56, 0.31 body length per second and a maximum and average angular velocity of 145.05°/s and 14.72°/s.

Optimal Leg Linkage Design for Horizontal Propel of a Walking Robot Using Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm

“…[78] Furthermore, the Adaptive Polyploid Memetic Algorithm, as explored by Dulebenets (2021) [2], offers a promising approach for scheduling and resource allocation problems. This algorithm's flexibility and adaptability could be instrumental in optimizing the scheduling of computational tasks in robotic systems, particularly in environments with high variability and complexity.…”

“…At the heart of this challenge is the design of leg linkages, a critical aspect that enables efficient, stable, and adaptable movement across varied terrains. The sophistication and optimization of leg linkage in walking robots are more crucial than ever, as robotics extend their reach into various sectors such as healthcare, disaster recovery, and space exploration [2].…”

Advances in artificial muscles: A brief literature and patent review

“…In the last 2 years, the performance metrics of artificial muscles have been upgraded and have continued to gain new applications in the field of soft robotics. We can see the refinement of artificial muscle powered insect-sized robots ( Wang Z et al, 2021 ; Kim D et al, 2022 ), the improvement of artificial muscle driven water-walking robots ( Zhou X et al, 2021 ; Kim S et al, 2022 ), soft tension robots for exploring unknown spaces ( Kobayashi et al, 2022 ; Zhou et al, 2022a ), the enhancement of artificial muscle driven soft crawling robots ( Liu et al, 2021 ; Wu et al, 2022 ), the realization of rehabilitation assistance training robot based on pneumatic artificial muscles ( Wang and Xu, 2021 ; Chu et al, 2022 ; Tsai and Chiang, 2022 ), control optimization and modeling of artificial muscle-actuated endo-exoskeleton robots ( Chen et al, 2022 ; Lin et al, 2021 ; Liu H et al, 2022 ; Yang et al, 2022 ), and the application of SNA in soft wearable robots ( Jeong et al, 2022 ).…”

Development of a novel two-way 3D printed flexible spiral composite actuator based on shape memory alloy wire and its control

“…Soft actuation can be provided by using a soft material like shape memory polymer [23,24] or integrating an elastic material like an shape memory alloy wire (SMAW) [25][26][27] to any soft body. The integration can be carried out by different methods such as molding, curing [28,29] or 3D printing [6,11,[30][31][32][33][34].…”