Autonomous undulatory serpentine locomotion utilizing body dynamics of a fluidic soft robot

• Published in: Bioinspiration & biomimetics Vol. 8; no. 2; pp. 26003 - 1-10
• Main Authors: Onal, Cagdas D, Rus, Daniela
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England IOP Publishing 01.06.2013
• Subjects: Actuation; Animals; Artificial Intelligence; Autonomous; Biomimetics - instrumentation; Computer Simulation; Dynamical systems; Dynamics; Equipment Design; Equipment Failure Analysis; fluidic actuation; Hardness; Locomotion; Locomotion - physiology; Models, Biological; Rheology - instrumentation; Robotics; Robotics - instrumentation; Robots; snake locomotion; Snakes; Snakes - physiology; soft robotics
• ISSN: 1748-3182; 1748-3190; 1748-3190
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-3182/8/2/026003

Soft robotics offers the unique promise of creating inherently safe and adaptive systems. These systems bring man-made machines closer to the natural capabilities of biological systems. An important requirement to enable self-contained soft mobile robots is an on-board power source. In this paper, we present an approach to create a bio-inspired soft robotic snake that can undulate in a similar way to its biological counterpart using pressure for actuation power, without human intervention. With this approach, we develop an autonomous soft snake robot with on-board actuation, power, computation and control capabilities. The robot consists of four bidirectional fluidic elastomer actuators in series to create a traveling curvature wave from head to tail along its body. Passive wheels between segments generate the necessary frictional anisotropy for forward locomotion. It takes 14 h to build the soft robotic snake, which can attain an average locomotion speed of 19 mm s−1.