Snapping instabilities in soft structures offer a powerful pathway to achieve rapid and energy-efficient actuation. In this study, an eccentric dome-shaped snapping actuator is developed to generate controllable asymmetric motion through geometry-induced instability. Finite element simulations and experiments reveal consistent asymmetric deformation and the corresponding pressure characteristics. By coupling four snapping actuators in a pneumatic network, a compact quadrupedal robot achieves coordinated wavelike locomotion using only a single pressure input. The robot exhibits frequency-dependent performance with a maximum speed of 72.78~mm/s at 7.5~Hz. These findings demonstrate the potential of asymmetric snapping mechanisms for physically controlled actuation and lay the groundwork for fully untethered and efficient soft robotic systems.
@article{arxiv.2602.18421,
title = {Snapping Actuators with Asymmetric and Sequenced Motion},
author = {Xin Li and Ye Jin and Mohsen Jafarpour and Hugo de Souza Oliveira and Edoardo Milana},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18421},
year = {2026}
}
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9th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2026)