Multimodal locomotion ultra-thin soft robots for exploration of narrow spaces

Xi Wang, Siqian Li, Jung-Che Chang, Jing Liu, Dragos Axinte and Xin Dong ()
Additional contact information
Xi Wang: University of Nottingham
Siqian Li: University of Nottingham
Jung-Che Chang: University of Nottingham
Jing Liu: University of Nottingham
Dragos Axinte: University of Nottingham
Xin Dong: University of Nottingham

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract From power plants on land to bridges over the sea, safety-critical built environments require periodic inspections for detecting issues to avoid functional discontinuities of these installations. However, navigation paths in these environments are usually challenging as they often contain difficult-to-access spaces (near-millimetre and submillimetre-high gaps) and multiple domains (solid, liquid and even aerial). In this paper, we address these challenges by developing a class of Thin Soft Robots (TS-Robot: thickness, 1.7 mm) that can access narrow spaces and perform cross-domain multimodal locomotion. We adopted a dual-actuation sandwich structure with a tuneable Poisson’s ratio tensioning mechanism for developing the TS-Robots driven by dielectric elastomers, providing them with two types of gaits (linear and undulating), remarkable output force ( ~ 41 times their weight) and speed (1.16 times Body Length/s and 13.06 times Body Thickness/s). Here, we demonstrated that TS-Robots can crawl, climb, swim and collaborate for transitioning between domains in environments with narrow entries.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50598-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-50598-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-50598-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().