Design of Frictional 2D-Anisotropy Surface for Wriggle Locomotion of Printable Soft-Bodied Robots

Soft-bodied and continuum robots have shown great adaptability to the environment thanks to its flexibility of the body. They have great potential in environment exploring or rescuing mission. One of those robots is snake-like soft-bodied robots. A snake robot is often made by attaching passive wheels along a long body to achieve frictional anisotropy. This anisotropic structure helps to propel the body with serpentine locomotion and prevents it from sliding laterally. However, with a snake-like soft-bodied robot, attaching wheels is not only clumsy but also adding weight to the robot. In this paper, being inspired by the scales on the skin of a snake, we propose a designing scheme to achieve an all-printed wriggle soft-bodied robot by patterning high and low friction material to the ventral side of the robot. Compared to a totally flat ventral, we are able to speed-up the serpentine locomotion 2.8 times. Besides, by changing the configuration of high/low friction material, our wriggle soft-bodied robot can easily move forward or backward just by switching the controlling signal. The fabrication time is just less than 1 hour and the robot can achieve the speed of 26 mm/s.

[1]  広瀬 茂男,et al.  Biologically inspired robots : snake-like locomotors and manipulators , 1993 .

[2]  Tetsuya Iwasaki,et al.  Serpentine locomotion with robotic snakes , 2002 .

[3]  Shigeo Hirose,et al.  Biologically Inspired Snake-like Robots , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics.

[4]  Wei-Hsin Liao,et al.  A Snake Robot Using Shape Memory Alloys , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics.

[5]  Brent W. Spranklin,et al.  A survey of snake-inspired robot designs , 2009, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[6]  Jasmine A. Nirody,et al.  The mechanics of slithering locomotion , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[7]  M. Demirel,et al.  An engineered anisotropic nanofilm with unidirectional wetting properties. , 2010, Nature materials.

[8]  Amir Akramin Shafie,et al.  Kinematics Model of Snake Robot Considering Snake Scale , 2010 .

[9]  Daniela Rus,et al.  Autonomous undulatory serpentine locomotion utilizing body dynamics of a fluidic soft robot , 2013, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[10]  Takuya Umedachi,et al.  Highly deformable 3-D printed soft robot generating inching and crawling locomotions with variable friction legs , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[11]  Takuya Umedachi,et al.  Design of a 3D-printed soft robot with posture and steering control , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[12]  Daniela Rus,et al.  Autonomous Soft Robotic Fish Capable of Escape Maneuvers Using Fluidic Elastomer Actuators. , 2014, Soft robotics.

[13]  Fuchen Chen,et al.  Slithering towards autonomy: a self-contained soft robotic snake platform with integrated curvature sensing , 2015, Bioinspiration & biomimetics.

[14]  Rambod Rastegari,et al.  Design of hyper redundant robot using ball screw mechanism approach , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM).

[15]  Aravinthan D. T. Samuel,et al.  C. elegans locomotion: small circuits, complex functions , 2015, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[16]  Robert J. Wood,et al.  An integrated design and fabrication strategy for entirely soft, autonomous robots , 2016, Nature.

[17]  Liangliang Zhu,et al.  A novel slithering locomotion mechanism for a snake-like soft robot , 2017 .

[18]  Xi Chen,et al.  Architectures of soft robotic locomotion enabled by simple mechanical principles. , 2016, Soft matter.