Soft climbing robot with magnetic feet for multimodal locomotion

Abstract

Inspection robots that can be used to inspect man-made structures have significant potential for industrial applications, but existing soft robots are not well suited for the exploration of complex metallic structures with many obstacles. This paper proposes a soft climbing robot well suited for such conditions as the robot uses feet with a controllable magnetic adhesion. It uses soft inflatable actuators to control this adhesion as well as the deformation of the body. The proposed robot consists of a robot body that can bend and lengthen, robot feet that can magnetically adhere to and detach from metallic surface, and rotational joints connecting each foot to the body to give the robot additional flexibility. It combines extensional soft actuators for the deformation of the body and contractile linear actuators for the robot feet, and the robot can produce complex deformations of the body that allow it to overcome a variety of scenarios. The capabilities of the proposed robot were verified through the implementation of three scenarios on metallic surfaces: crawling, climbing, and transitioning between surfaces. The robots could crawl or climb nearly interchangeably, could transition to and from horizontal surfaces to either upward or downward vertical surfaces.

Computational synthesis of locomotive soft robots by topology optimization

“…Locomotive soft robots (SoRos) have drawn prominent research attention in recent years due to their advantages of adapting to environments ( 1 , 2 ) and compatibility with humans ( 3 ). Because of their inherent material softness, SoRos can assume a high degree of freedom in their states (postures) compared with their rigid-bodied counterparts ( 3 ), enabling them to realize various modes of locomotion observed in biological organisms such as crawling ( 4 – 10 ), walking ( 11 , 12 ), climbing ( 13 , 14 ), swimming ( 15 – 19 ), and spinning ( 20 ). These modes of locomotion are often coupled with the shape of the SoRos ( 21 ).…”