Abstract
The agile and efficient locomotion of water striders on water surface is attributed to the water repellency ability of their slender legs. The legs are usually treated as rigid beams, neglecting the effect of flexible deformation on its movement. Several studies proved that the stable floating ability of water striders is closely related to the flexible legs. This paper focuses on exploring the flexible driven mechanism between the insect and the surface of water and applied them to design a robot. The spatial deformation and force models of the driving legs are established and analyzed based on the Euler-Bernoulli's beam theory. The influence of flexural rigidity and depth of a driving leg on the rowing speed is studied. Results indicates that a flexible driving leg can effectively increase its critical rowing speed and ensure that it does not penetrate the water surface at a higher speed, thus achieving a bigger driving force. Then a water strider robot capable of walking on water surface is proposed, which possesses ellipse-like spatial trajectories by using a limit pin-linkage. The driving legs are fabricated by different stiffness materials. Finally, the skating experiments of the robots with different stiffness of the driving legs were carried out. The results verified that the maximum rowing frequency of the flexible driving legs and maximum moving speed of the robot are more than 30% higher than those with rigid legs, respectively. Moreover, a similarity analysis of hydrodynamic characteristic constants reveals that the flexible driving robot is more analogous to the biological water striders.
Highlights
Aquatic creatures depending on surface tension driven method possess high agile and effective locomotion, which has an important inspiration for the exploration and development of surface tension driving technology
The characteristic velocity of the robot with flexible legs is closer to a water strider
The theoretical results show that compared with rigid legs, flexible driving legs can row on water surface with a larger rowing velocity before penetrating the water surface
Summary
Aquatic creatures depending on surface tension driven method possess high agile and effective locomotion, which has an important inspiration for the exploration and development of surface tension driving technology. When the flexible driving leg rows on water surface at a certain angular velocity, the horizontal deformation of the leg will result in the change of the rowing velocity of each segment, which affects its horizontal forces. The numerical solution, along with the theoretical analysis results, suggests that flexible driving legs can row on water surface with a larger velocity due to its horizontal and vertical deformation. It consists of the water entry and exist, swing back and rowing on water surface, according to the depth of the leg. It is worth noting that when the driving leg rows on water surface, the driving force caused by water surface is constrained by the left side of the limit pin and no rotation occurred during the rowing process
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