Leveraging elastic instabilities for amplified performance: Spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots

By Yichao Tang, Yinding Chi, Jiefeng Sun, Tzu-Hao Huang, O. H. Maghsoudi, A. Spence, Jianguo Zhao, Hao Su, Jie Yin. Science Advances, 2018

443 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bistable spined soft robots enable high-speed cheetah-like galloping and fast-speed swimming, as well as high-force manipulation. 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.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/955eef1888349597acf2dc99af4f7ff755a5df01