A 2D Pneumatic Soft Robot with Suckers for Locomotion

Abstract

Soft robots have a great application potential in agriculture, military and disaster search and rescue and a flexible locomotivity is required for soft robots. This paper presents the design and fabrication procedure of a soft pneumatic robot that can move in different directions with various gaits and is called 2D-SSR. The robot is composed of two soft actuators, which perform pure 2D bending, and three rigid connectors with three suckers. Based on specific sequences of seven air channels and the derived geometric kinematics, various gaits including moving forward and turning were simulated. The critical conditions of periodic locomotion were analyzed and the relationship between air pressure and bending angle was acquired in some tests. In order to verify the feasibility of the development of the new soft robot and gait simulations, the experiments of moving forward and turning were executed on both the single-module robot and double-module robot.