A Modular Crawling Robot Driven by A Single-layer Conical Dielectric Elastomer

Abstract

The crawling robots driven by soft actuators attracted a growing interest in past decade due to their lightweight, inherent compliance and robustness to unstructured environment. In this work, we present a crawling robot driven by a single cone dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) with a biasing element of deadweight. Due to the fast response, inherent elasticity and large bandwidth of silicone-based DEA, the crawling robot can achieve a peak velocity of 110mm/s which is 1.89 times of body length at its resonance. Thanks to its simple structure, some modular combinations can be easily launched to enhance load capacity and herein we present a case of two module in parallel to achieve steering with an average angular velocity of 25.75º/s. Finally, a primary demo to show a ‘S’ shape path is demonstrated.