A vibro-impact crawling robot driven by dielectric elastomer artificial muscles

Abstract

Inspired by the crawling locomotion in living organisms, many crawling robots have been developed by adopting a two-anchor crawling or anisotropic friction-based crawling principle. However, critical limitations still exist in these robot designs, e.g., complex anchoring mechanisms and contamination and wear issues, which affect their reliable applications in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel crawling robot design driven by dielectric elastomer artificial muscles. The proposed robot utilizes a vibro-impact crawling principle, which eliminates the necessity of complex anchoring mechanisms in conventional crawling robot designs, thus potentially reduces the fabrication and control complexity hence improves the robustness. Experimental studies were conducted in this work to characterize both the quasi-static and dynamic responses of the dielectric elastomer actuator. The performance of the proposed robot was also investigated experimentally and the fundamental mechanisms account for the vibro-impact crawling locomotion were analyzed. The developed robot prototype features a 30 mm length and a total weight of 10.5 g. It is capable of crawling at a velocity of 13.4 mm/s or 0.45 body-Iength/s in tubular channels. The robot proposed in this work can have promising applications in, for instance, industrial pipeline inspections, soft capsule endoscopes and search-and-rescue.