A Snake-like Swimming Robot with an Artificial Muscle

摘要

Our goal is to make an artificial muscle, ionic polymer metal composites, swim with snake-like bending motion. It is easy to miniaturize the artificial muscle because of its simple structure. In addition, the snake-like motion sweeps a smaller area than simple bending motion. Thus it is suitable to apply to future coming swimming robots in thin tubes or in blood vessels, etc. To realize the snake-like bending motion, we cut the surface of the artificial muscle by laser and made insulated patterns on it. By applying voltage with different phase, we can control each segment individually. We have developed a variety of motions including snake-like motion from this patterned artificial muscle. We have also measured the impelling force generated by its snake-like motion. By changing phases and frequencies of voltages which are input to each segment, we can control the speed and the direction of the locomotion. We succeeded in making the muscle swim forward and backward by finding the optimal phase and frequency.