Fast Untethered Soft Robotic Crawler with Elastic Instability (ICRA 2023)

I am a Ph.D. student at Columbia Univ., working on bi- and multi-stable mechanisms for robotic design. This work is submitted to the 2023 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Abstract:
This paper demonstrates a single-servo-driving untethered soft robot that is capable of galloping at a speed of 313 mm/s or 1.56 body length per second (BL/s), a factor of 5.2 times and 2.6 times faster (respectively) than the fastest reported untethered soft robots. An in-plane prestressed hair-clip mechanism (HCM) made of compliant materials like plastic sheets is used as an actuator force amplifier spine. We explore the influence of factors such as actuation frequency, substrates, tethering/untethering, and symmetric/asymmetric actuation.

Thanks.