Autonomous Soft Robotic Fish Capable of Escape Maneuvers Using Fluidic Elastomer Actuators

By Andrew D. Marchese, Cagdas Denizel Onal, Daniela Rus. Soft Robotics, 2014

916 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In this work we describe an autonomous soft-bodied robot that is both self-contained and capable of rapid, continuum-body motion. We detail the design, modeling, fabrication, and control of the soft fish, focusing on enabling the robot to perform rapid escape responses. The robot employs a compliant body with embedded actuators emulating the slender anatomical form of a fish. In addition, the robot has a novel fluidic actuation system that drives body motion and has all the subsystems of a traditional robot onboard: power, actuation, processing, and control. At the core of the fish's soft body is an array of fluidic elastomer actuators. We design the fish to emulate escape responses in addition to forward swimming because such maneuvers require rapid body accelerations and continuum-body motion. These maneuvers showcase the performance capabilities of this self-contained robot. The kinematics and controllability of the robot during simulated escape response maneuvers are analyzed and compared with studies on biological fish. We show that during escape responses, the soft-bodied robot has similar input–output relationships to those observed in biological fish. The major implication of this work is that we show soft robots can be both self-contained and capable of rapid body motion.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f933e2655b824ff0e3cfd75745f78df858df0edb

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Citations in the corpus

MakeSense: Automated Sensor Design for Proprioceptive Soft Robots (2019, neutral): “Fe = [ xe,1 − xe,4 xe,2 − xe,4 xe,3 − xe,4 ] Be (16)”
A Resilient, Untethered Soft Robot (2014, positive): “10 Recent work has demonstrated robots propelled by pneumatically powered soft actuators capable of untethered operation underwater, 11 and on land, with rolling 12 and serpentine loco-motion.”
Soft robotics: Technologies and systems pushing the boundaries of robot abilities (2016, neutral): “A solution to overcome these limits is based on soft actuators [flexible fluidic actuators (FFAs)], which guarantee high dexterity together with an intrinsic capability of safely interacting with tissues and organs.”
Bio-inspired soft robotics: Material selection, actuation, and design (2018, background): “Pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) [67,68], fluidic elastomer actuators [69], PneuNets [20,21,70], PneuFlex [71]) are driven by compressed air or pressurized fluids to inflate elastomeric materials at positive pressures relative to ambient air [6,72].”
A soft robot that navigates its environment through growth (2017, background): “Although roboticists have successfully recreated movement through the environment using locomotion, defined as the translation of the body from one location to another (8)—flying (9), running (10), swimming (11, 12), cytoplasmic streaming (13), slithering (14), and leaping (15)—navigating the enviro”
Fast-moving soft electronic fish (2017, background): “In particular, mimicking the exceptional agility of insects (16, 17), fish (18), octopuses (19, 20), and snakes (21) has been a longtime pursuit.”
Design, kinematics, and control of a soft spatial fluidic elastomer manipulator (2016, methodology): “This stage is accomplished using a geometric algorithm referred to here as singleSegInvKin() and developed by the authors in Marchese et al. (2014b).”