A Soft Pneumatic Crawling Robot with Unbalanced Inflation

Abstract

Soft pneumatic robots have gained research interests in many fields, showing an advantage of compliance and safeness to human-robotic interaction and various environments. In this paper, a multi/dual-chamber soft crawling robot based on unbalanced pneumatic actuation is presented, which requires only simple design and control to realize the forward locomotion and steering. The design is composed of three parts: the main part of the crawling robot is made of hyper-elastic silicone rubber; an unstretchable fabric is attached outside of part of the robot to form an exterior constraint; two chambers are mounted on the head as steering module. Experiments validate the design in principle and an adequate locomotion performance of the robot. Due to the simple, low-cost structure and its flexible actuation, such crawling robots can be used to perform pipeline exploration, search and rescue missions.