A novel bioinspired hexapod robot developed by soft dielectric elastomer actuators

This paper presents a hexapod crawling robot which has bioinspired design and locomotion posture from the insects. The robot, called S-Hex II, is an upgraded version of the different printable monolithic hexapod robot which is named as S-Hex I. The S-Hex II is studied for the project of developing mesoscale walking robots actuated by the soft dielectric elastomer actuators. In comparison with the S-Hex I, the S-Hex II owns smaller dimension, lighter weight, and significantly faster walking speed. We improve and increase the total number of degree-of-freedom (DOF) of the soft dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) from three, used in the S-Hex I, up to five, employed in the S-Hex II, and that provides the promising versatile locomotion ability to the S-Hex II robot. This robot has successfully demonstrated the back and forth ambulation on flat surfaces using the alternating tripod gait with the walking speed of 52 mm/s (approximately 0.35 body-lengths per second) at 7 Hz of actuation frequency.