Morphing Robots Using Robotic Skins That Sculpt Clay

Abstract

Shape versatility is a mechanism that many animals leverage to effectively interact-with and locomote-within the natural world. Toward the goal of shape-changing artificial systems, we present morphing robots comprised of robotic skins and sculptable materials. Herein, we describe robotic skins—planar, skin-like substrates with embedded actuation—that are wrapped around sculptable materials in order to actively shape those materials into different forms. Our approach is inspired by the art of sculpture, where surface strains and pressures applied by hand allow clay to be sculpted into nearly any desired shape. Replacing hands with robotic skins, we achieve morphing capabilities in a robotic system. We focus on an example robot in which two robotic skins are layered on a base sculptable material to induce both locomotion and morphing behaviors, and show that morphing enables the robot to overcome obstacles during locomotion. This letter is the first instantiation of morphing robots based on sculpture-inspired surface manipulation of sculptable materials, where shape-changing capabilities are expected to improve robot adaptability to meet the demands of changing environments, overcome obstacles, or perform variable tasks.