The Design And Research Of A Soft Crawling Robot

With the rapid development of science and technology,the application of robot is becoming more and more extensive.However,the traditional rigid robots have poor adaptability to the unstructured environment,and the degree of freedom is limited,which is difficult to meet the needs of some special fields.Therefore,the soft robots arise at this moment.Soft robots usually take the mollusks in nature as bionic objects and adopt high elastic materials as the main body.Theoretically,they have infinite numbers of degrees of freedom,and can change their shape and size according to the requirements.Namely,they have excellent environmental adaptability.Moreover,soft robots are able to operate irregular or fragile objects because of their soft main body.All these advantages make them especially suitable for the rescue exploration,medical services and other fields.Although soft robots have above-mentioned unique advantages,it is undeniable that there are still many problems in the current stage,which restrict their practical application.Among them,the most prominent problem is the inaccuracy of modeling and control caused by the unpredictability of soft material deformation,and weak load capacity is also a serious problem.Some related researches about motor-wire actuated soft crawling robot have been carried out in this paper.The main contents and innovations are summarized as follows:(1)A motor-wire actuated soft robot is designed and manufactured and its crawling is realized.The robot is mainly made of silica gel with discrete contact between the bottom and the substrate.Both ends of the robot are fixed with a friction mechanism to help crawling.The modular design is convenient to assemble and maintain.(2)Aiming at the current situation that there are few soft crawling robots with turning function in the same driving mode.Two methods are given to realize the turning function.They are,firstly,a four-drive-wires soft robot is designed to realize the functions of crawling forward,crawling backward and one-way turning according to the influence of drive-wire path on turning,secondly,a six-drive-wires soft robot with a switching device is designed to realize its crawling and two-way turning.(3)A "three-motor" soft robot is carried out to achieve the crawling and two-way turning stably.(4)Taking the crawling process of "two-motor" soft robot as an example,the simulation of the movement is carried out by using the Hypermesh and LS-DYNA software,and the simulation results similar to the actual motion process are obtained after meshing,section / material property definition,boundary conditions / contact definition,calculation and other steps.