Soft Scalable Crawling Robots Enabled by Programmable Origami and Electrostatic Adhesion

Abstract

This letter reports a soft and scalable crawling robot that can actively adapt to flat planes and tubes without manual adjustment. The robot is mainly composed of a programmable origami body and two flexible electrostatic pads with a measured thickness of around 34 μm. The pad generates considerable adhesion on flat, convex, and concave substrates due to low deformation resistance. Origami bodies with different cross-sectional shapes are also fabricated and studied. Artificial muscles (e.g., shape memory alloy and vacuum actuation) are incorporated into the origami bodies to construct soft crawling robots at different scales. These robots can achieve multimodal movements, such as dual-mode crawling, turning, and climbing on flat planes, and move inside and outside a tube. In addition, the robot can be combined with a lightweight soft origami gripper to demonstrate the ability to manipulate objects along the way.