Abstract
Soft-matter robotics, which is named for robots made from soft materials, will possibly conquer the limit of conventional rigid body dynamics of hard robots made from hard materials. For example, a snake-like robot, of which body is made from soft materials, will walk in various environments including narrow space like drain pipes with complicated structure. Here we developed a walking robot with the friction control of double-network hydrogel (DN gel) on its feet, as the first model based on the concept of the soft-matter robotics. It is found that with appropriate control of the friction of DN gel, the inchworm walking robot has realized its high enough velocity for pipe inspection. We discussed the physical principle of the walking motion of the inchworm search robot and its actual mechanism to provide thrust for its walking motion.
Highlights
The conventional robots are mainly composed of hard materials such as metals and plastics based on rigid body dynamics
We have successfully developed the first prototype of the inchworm search robot utilizing the unique properties of double-network hydrogel (DN gel) feet and demonstrate fundamental running experiment
The results of running experiment confirmed that this robot can realize effective peristaltic motion by using DC motors and friction change effect of DN gel feet as the soft-matter robot based on biomimetics with significant differences
Summary
The conventional robots are mainly composed of hard materials such as metals and plastics based on rigid body dynamics. Such conventional robots have a possibility to hurt humans and other animals incidentally. For this reason, various types of soft robots are being developed to realize intrinsic safety against living creatures. The Whitesides research group developed the soft robots made with soft elastomeric polymers (Shepherd et al, 2011; Morin et al, 2012). There are a few studies utilizing material science of soft matters such as colloid, surfactant, and polymer hydrogels for the same purpose
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