Multigait soft robot

By Robert F. Shepherd, F. Ilievski, Wonjae Choi, Stephen A. Morin, Adam A. Stokes, Aaron D. Mazzeo, Xin Chen, M. Wang, George M. Whitesides. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011

2,057 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This manuscript describes a unique class of locomotive robot: A soft robot, composed exclusively of soft materials (elastomeric polymers), which is inspired by animals (e.g., squid, starfish, worms) that do not have hard internal skeletons. Soft lithography was used to fabricate a pneumatically actuated robot capable of sophisticated locomotion (e.g., fluid movement of limbs and multiple gaits). This robot is quadrupedal; it uses no sensors, only five actuators, and a simple pneumatic valving system that operates at low pressures (< 10 psi). A combination of crawling and undulation gaits allowed this robot to navigate a difficult obstacle. This demonstration illustrates an advantage of soft robotics: They are systems in which simple types of actuation produce complex motion.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b217c8d7e5a22dadd14f42b80b86224596882046

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Harnessing bistability for directional propulsion of soft, untethered robots (2018, background): “Tethered pneumatics, for example, enabled active agonistic and antagonistic motion (13) and an undulating serpentine (14).”
Autonomous Soft Robotic Fish Capable of Escape Maneuvers Using Fluidic Elastomer Actuators (2014, positive): “Some ﬂuid-powered soft machines show promising capabilities such as walking 10 and leaping 11 but are primarily driven by cumbersome external hardware limiting their practical use.”
Design, kinematics, and control of a soft spatial fluidic elastomer manipulator (2016, background): “Shepherd et al. (2011) and Tolley et al. (2014) developed walking robots, and Shepherd et al. (2013) developed a jumping robot.”