Multimodal locomotion ultra-thin soft robots for exploration of narrow spaces

Wang, Xi; Li, Siqian; Chang, Jung-Che; Liu, Jing; Axinte, Dragos; Dong, Xin

Abstract

From power plants on land to bridges over the sea, safety-critical built environments require periodic inspections for detecting issues to avoid functional discontinuities of these installations. However, navigation paths in these environments are usually challenging as they often contain difficult-to-access spaces (near-millimetre and submillimetre-high gaps) and multiple domains (solid, liquid and even aerial). In this paper, we address these challenges by developing a class of Thin Soft Robots (TS-Robot: thickness, 1.7mm) that can access narrow spaces and perform cross-domain multimodal locomotion. We adopted a dual-actuation sandwich structure with a tuneable Poisson's ratio tensioning mechanism for developing the TS-Robots driven by dielectric elastomers, providing them with two types of gaits (linear and undulating), remarkable output force (~41 times their weight) and speed (1.16 times Body Length/s and 13.06 times Body Thickness/s). Here, we demonstrated that TS-Robots can crawl, climb, swim and collaborate for transitioning between domains in environments with narrow entries.

Citation

Wang, X., Li, S., Chang, J.-C., Liu, J., Axinte, D., & Dong, X. (2024). Multimodal locomotion ultra-thin soft robots for exploration of narrow spaces. Nature Communications, 15, Article 6296. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50598-1

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 12, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jul 26, 2024
• Publication Date: Jul 26, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jul 12, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 12, 2024
• Journal: Nature Communications
• Electronic ISSN: 2041-1723
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 15
• Article Number: 6296
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50598-1
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/37157240
• Publisher URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50598-1