A Soft Crawling Robot Inspired by Inchworms

摘要

This paper presents a soft crawling robot inspired by inchworms. The robot is composed of two soft feet and a soft body with a bidirectional bending motion. Both the body and the feet are made of the same kinds of actuators. In comparison with other soft inchworm-inspired robots, the robot is featured with easy preparation, simple driving mode and outstanding performance in environment adaptability. The soft actuators of the robot are all pneumatically powered. The two feet are strong enough to allow the robot to crawl along a tube by grasping. Additionally, different surface materials of these two feet make it possible to crawl on a plane with an anchor-motion movement. Experiments have been conducted to testify the performance of the robot.