A Multimodal Soft Crawling-Climbing Robot with the Controllable Horizontal Plane to Slope Transition

Abstract

Most of the existing soft locomotive robots are capable of moving on horizontal planes and small-angled slopes, but few of them can accomplish the large-angled slope climbing or wall climbing. We introduce an inchworm inspired soft crawling-climbing robot capable of continuous motion from a horizontal plane to a slope of up to 75 degrees and it can perform multiple locomotion including crawling, climbing, and the transition between them. This soft crawling-climbing robot is powered by three pneumatic actuators connected in series that deforms with two degrees of freedom, negative pressure sucker feet that generate periodical adhesion, and a semi-automatic controlling system synchronizing the body shape and anchoring of the feet. The robot mimics the body deformation and feet anchoring pattern exhibited by inchworms and can be applied in inspection, surveillance, and rescuing.