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

Autor: Xi Wang, Siqian Li, Jung-Che Chang, Jing Liu, Dragos Axinte, Xin Dong
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2024
Předmět:
Zdroj: Nature Communications, Vol 15, Iss 1, Pp 1-15 (2024)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2041-1723
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-50598-1
Popis: 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, 1.7 mm) 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.
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