A rolling soft cable climbing robot: Design analysis and fabrication

Abstract

The flexible performance of the soft robots can adapt to the unstructured surface. They have excellent robustness and security, and have become a hot spot of research. The design of the flexible mechanism is fit for climbing rigid rods and cables, improve the ability to adjust to obstacles, external vibration and other uncertain environment. The soft pole-climbing robots are designed and the mechanical analysis is carried out. By means of establishing the mechanical model of the robot, the modeling approach of robotic gradient rigidity is studied, the adhesive and climbing mechanism between the soft actuator and the hard surface are explored. On this basis, soft pole-climbing robots which can adapt to the vibrational state of the cable are designed and fabricated. This topic is expected to provide a new type of driving scheme for soft robots and solve the problem, which rigid robots are unstable due to high altitude stream.