Soft wall-climbing robots

Abstract

Existing robots capable of climbing walls mostly rely on rigid actuators such as electric motors, but soft wall-climbing robots based on muscle-like actuators have not yet been achieved. Here, we report a tethered soft robot capable of climbing walls made of wood, paper, and glass at 90°with a speed of up to 0.75 body length per second and multimodal locomotion, including climbing, crawling, and turning. This soft wallclimbing robot is enabled by (i) dielectric-elastomer artificial muscles that generate fast periodic deformation of the soft robotic body, (ii) electroadhesive feet that give spatiotemporally controlled adhesion of different parts of the robot on the wall, and (iii) a control strategy that synchronizes the body deformation and feet electroadhesion for stable climbing. We further demonstrate that our soft robot could carry a camera to take videos in a vertical tunnel, change its body height to navigate through a confined space, and follow a labyrinth-like planar trajectory. Our soft robot mimicked the vertical climbing capability and the agile adaptive motions exhibited by soft organisms.

Encoding Smart Microjoints for Microcrawlers with Enhanced Locomotion

“…Material is crucial for the design of microrobots, which regulates their mechanical properties and further determines their functions. Smart materials, which can sense and react to external stimuli, such as temperature, pH, light, humidity, magnetism, and electric fields, are indispensable for fabricating untethered soft microrobots. However, almost all stimuli–response materials reported exclusively exhibit a monotonic dependence of swelling deformation with some specific stimulus.…”

A Unidirectional Soft Dielectric Elastomer Actuator Enabled by Built-In Honeycomb Metastructures

“…Soft robotics, an emerging multidisciplinary field, has been receiving increasing attention in the past decade, due to the flexibility and adaptability offered by soft materials to interact with unstructured environments [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Soft actuators, typically made of compliant materials that are responsive to external physical stimuli, play a key role in enabling the functionalities of soft robots.…”

“…The simplicity of DEAs in terms of the structure and working principle permits direct energy transformation between electric energy and mechanical energy with high efficiency and large frequency bandwidth. With these distinguished properties, various soft DEA-based machines and robots have been developed, ranging from tactile displays [19][20][21] and grippers [22][23][24] to bioinspired locomotive robots [2,25,26] and flying microrobots [27].…”

“…When using DEAs to devise reconfigurable structures or robots, a fundamental issue is how to achieve desired deformations upon electric activation. For instance, confined motions along a specific direction may be in high demand for a soft DEA-based robot that works in a congested environment [2]. In a general sense, since DEs are homogeneous isotropic materials, it requires inclusion of anisotropy in terms of the actuator configuration or the electric activation to generate user-defined deformation.…”

Dragonfly Inspired Smart Soft Robot

“…In doing so, these robots must exhibit efficient locomotion, rapid responsiveness to environmental changes, and adaptation akin to living organisms while navigating natural environments with immense diversity. Most research in the area of soft robotics has focused on mimicking zoomorphic motions, including bending (12)(13)(14)(15), crawling (4,13), climbing (16), rolling (17), jumping (18) and swimming (1,2,14,19), inspired by organisms such as snakes, octopuses, spiders, caterpillars, jellyfish, and stingrays.…”