Fabrication and Testing of a PneuNet Actuator-Based Caterpillar Like Amphibian Soft Robot for Multi-Terrain Applications

Abstract

Bio-inspired structures provide several new possibilities in the area of robotics due to their superiority and diversity in execution. Researchers have been developing various robotic applications with the combination of soft materials such as silicone and various 3D printed materials. These kinds of soft robots can be useful for various human-robotic interactions such as search and rescue, medical surgery and so on. In this work, we present the fabrication and characterization of a small caterpillar-like soft robot (7 cm <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\times 3.5$</tex> cm <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\times 3$</tex> cm) powered using PneuNet actuation. Due to the limitations of traditional robotics, we believe that such soft material-based robots can be effective in various applications. The fabricated silicone-based PneuNet soft robot, which moves like a caterpillar, has also been embedded with an ESP camera module and LED light to enable applications such as surveillance and search-and-rescue. This soft robotic actuator can also perform tasks on various types of terrains, including ice and water surface. We find that the normalized distance travelled per actuation cycle on gravel to be 0.23 BL.