{"title":"Untethered Soft Crawling Robot Based on Origami Inspired Soft-rigid Hybrid Actuator","authors":"Jianbin Liu, Guoyu Ma, Tianyu Zhang, Xianlei Shan, Rongjie Kang, Rencheng Zheng, Haitao Liu","doi":"10.1007/s42235-025-00682-z","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper presents an untethered pneumatic soft robot which can crawl both in horizontal and vertical pipes with different sizes and cross sections. This robot uses modular origami inspired soft-rigid hybrid actuator to produce telescoping and anchoring movements powered by vacuum pressure. The introduction of grooves to valley crease significantly lowers the full contraction vacuum pressure and improves the response, allowing the system can be driven by an onboard micro vacuum pump, enabling the possibility of miniaturization, integration, and untethered operation of the robot. A series of crawling experiments in pipes with different sizes and cross sections constructed by acrylic are conducted to validate the crawling performance of the robot. Within square cross-section pipes, the robot can achieve a velocity of 9.4 mm/s in horizontal crawling and 7.7 mm/s in vertical upward crawling. For horizontal crawling in circular pipes, it can reach a velocity of 8.0 mm/s. When fully charged, the robot can crawl for 40 min with a mileage of 16.649 m, which is sufficient for most drainage and industrial pipelines detection tasks. The robot demonstrates excellent endurance and speed performance that exceed most existing untethered soft pipe crawling robots.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":614,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Bionic Engineering","volume":"22 3","pages":"1071 - 1084"},"PeriodicalIF":5.8000,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Bionic Engineering","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42235-025-00682-z","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENGINEERING, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper presents an untethered pneumatic soft robot which can crawl both in horizontal and vertical pipes with different sizes and cross sections. This robot uses modular origami inspired soft-rigid hybrid actuator to produce telescoping and anchoring movements powered by vacuum pressure. The introduction of grooves to valley crease significantly lowers the full contraction vacuum pressure and improves the response, allowing the system can be driven by an onboard micro vacuum pump, enabling the possibility of miniaturization, integration, and untethered operation of the robot. A series of crawling experiments in pipes with different sizes and cross sections constructed by acrylic are conducted to validate the crawling performance of the robot. Within square cross-section pipes, the robot can achieve a velocity of 9.4 mm/s in horizontal crawling and 7.7 mm/s in vertical upward crawling. For horizontal crawling in circular pipes, it can reach a velocity of 8.0 mm/s. When fully charged, the robot can crawl for 40 min with a mileage of 16.649 m, which is sufficient for most drainage and industrial pipelines detection tasks. The robot demonstrates excellent endurance and speed performance that exceed most existing untethered soft pipe crawling robots.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Bionic Engineering (JBE) is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes original research papers and reviews that apply the knowledge learned from nature and biological systems to solve concrete engineering problems. The topics that JBE covers include but are not limited to:
Mechanisms, kinematical mechanics and control of animal locomotion, development of mobile robots with walking (running and crawling), swimming or flying abilities inspired by animal locomotion.
Structures, morphologies, composition and physical properties of natural and biomaterials; fabrication of new materials mimicking the properties and functions of natural and biomaterials.
Biomedical materials, artificial organs and tissue engineering for medical applications; rehabilitation equipment and devices.
Development of bioinspired computation methods and artificial intelligence for engineering applications.