High-speed locomotion of animals gives them tremendous advantages in exploring, hunting, and escaping from predators in varying environments. Enlightened by the fast-running gait of mammals like cheetahs and wolves, we designed and fabricated a single-servo-driving untethered soft robot that is capable of galloping at a speed of 313 mm/s or 1.56 body length per second (BL/s), 5.2 times and 2.6 times faster than the reported fastest predecessors in mm/s and BL/s, respectively, in literature. An in-plane prestressed hair clip mechanism (HCM) made up of semi-rigid materials like plastic is used as the supporting chassis, the compliant spine, and the muscle force amplifier of the robot at the same time, enabling the robot to be rapid and strong. The influence of factors including actuation frequency, substrates, tethering/untethering, and symmetric/asymmetric actuation is explored with experiments. Based on previous work, this paper further demonstrated the potential of HCM in addressing the speed problem of soft robots.
翻译:动物高速移动在探索、狩猎和躲避不同环境中的掠食动物方面给动物带来巨大的优势。在猎豹和狼等哺乳动物快速行走的情况下,我们设计并制造了一个单服务器驾驶的无节奏软机器人,它能够以每秒313毫米/秒或1.56个体长的速度,以每秒313毫米/秒的速度、5.2倍和2.6倍的速度,在文献中分别以毫米/秒和BL/秒报告速度最快的原型速度、5.2倍和2.6倍的速度进行探索。一个由塑料等半硬性材料制成的机内理发夹机制(HCM)被用作支持的底盘、符合要求的脊椎和机器人的肌肉放大器,同时使机器人能够快速和强大。通过实验探索了包括动作频率、子strate、系系/断层和对称/对称动作在内的各种因素的影响。根据以前的工作,该文件进一步展示了HCM在解决软机器人速度问题方面的潜力。