Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of spine-inspired fast and strong soft machines. Unlike most current soft robots that are designed as inherently and unimodally stable, our design leverages tunable snap-through bistability to fully explore the ability of soft robots to rapidly store and release energy within tens of milliseconds. We demonstrate this generic design principle with three high-performance soft machines: High-speed cheetah-like galloping crawlers with locomotion speeds of 2.68 body length/s, high-speed underwater swimmers (0.78 body length/s), and tunable low-to-high-force soft grippers with over 1 to 103 stiffness modulation (maximum load capacity is 11.4 kg). Our study establishes a new generic design paradigm of next-generation high-performance soft robots that are applicable for multifunctionality, different actuation methods, and materials at multiscales.
@article{arxiv.1810.08571,
title = {Leveraging Elastic instabilities for Amplified Performance: spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots},
author = {Yichao Tang and Yinding Chi and Jiefeng Sun and Tzu-Hao Huang and Omid H. Maghsoudi and Andrew Spence and Jianguo Zhao and Hao Su and Jie Yin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.08571},
year = {2020}
}