Related papers: HISSbot: Sidewinding with a Soft Snake Robot
Terrestrial locomotion requires generating appropriate ground reaction forces which depend on substrate geometry and physical properties. The richness of positions and orientations of terrain features in the 3-D world gives limbless animals…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
Compared to conventional wheeled transportation systems designed for flat surfaces, soft robots exhibit exceptional adaptability to various terrains, enabling stable movement in complex environments. However, due to the risk of collision…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
We examine the problem of snake-like locomotion by studying a system consisting of a planar inextensible elastic rod that is able to control its spontaneous curvature. Using a Cosserat model we derive, through variational principles, the…
Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
Snakes can bend their elongate bodies in various forms to traverse various environments. We understand how snakes use lateral bending to push against asperities on flat ground for propulsion, and snake robots can do so effectively. However,…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Bio-inspired multi-joint snake robots offer the advantages of terrain adaptability due to their limbless structure and high flexibility. However, a series of dozens of motor units in typical multiple-joint snake robots results in a heavy…
Along with the advancement of robot skin technology, there has been notable progress in the development of snake robots featuring body-surface tactile perception. In this study, we proposed a locomotion control framework for snake robots…
The selection of mobility modes for robot navigation consists of various trade-offs. Snake robots are ideal for traversing through constrained environments such as pipes, cluttered and rough terrain, whereas bipedal robots are more suited…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Spider monkeys (genus Ateles) have a prehensile tail that functions as a flexible, multipurpose fifth limb, enabling them to navigate complex terrains, grasp objects of various sizes, and swing between supports. Inspired by the spider…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…