Design of an Underactuated Peristaltic Robot on Soft Terrain

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative robotic mechanism for generating peristaltic motion for robotic locomotion systems. The designed underactuated peristaltic robot utilizes a minimum amount of electromechanical hardware. Such a minimal electromechanical design not only reduces the number of potential failure modes but also provides the robot design with great potential for scaling to larger and smaller applications. We performed several speed and force generation tests atop a variety of granular media. Our experiments show the effective design of robot mechanism where the robot can travel with a small input power (1.14W) at 6.0 mm/sec with 2.45 N force atop sand.