A Soft Robot for Ground Crawling: Design and Analysis

This paper presents the concept and design of a rolling soft crawling robot, which is made of natural soft or extensible material. Capabilities of squeezing, crawling, and morphing would rarely possible with a method based only on rigid links. In this article, the flexibility of soft robot is applied to crawling ground, which largely enhances the stability of machine and anti-interference. The idea is to apply the principle of the stiffness gradient layer on soft actuator, which can have the structure of 3 different stiffness layers. Based on establishing the mechanical model of soft crawling robot, the analysis of mechanical characteristics of robots, surface traction on the new soft climbing robot is provided. On this basis, finite element analysis and experiment are given to verify the robot actual crawling and expanding ability. This paper intends to provide a type of analysis of soft crawling robot and compare analysis with experiment to verify the robot’s crawling ability and stability. Potential problems and future are discussed.