title: Autonomous undulatory serpentine locomotion utilizing body dynamics of a fluidic soft robot.
abstract: Soft robotics offers the unique promise of creating inherently safe and adaptive systems. These systems bring man-made machines closer to the natural capabilities of biological systems. An important requirement to enable self-contained soft mobile robots is an on-board power source. In this paper, we present an approach to create a bio-inspired soft robotic snake that can undulate in a similar way to its biological counterpart using pressure for actuation power, without human intervention. With this approach, we develop an autonomous soft snake robot with on-board actuation, power, computation and control capabilities. The robot consists of four bidirectional fluidic elastomer actuators in series to create a traveling curvature wave from head to tail along its body. Passive wheels between segments generate the necessary frictional anisotropy for forward locomotion. It takes 14 h to build the soft robotic snake, which can attain an average locomotion speed of 19 mm s(-1).
authors.affiliation: Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. cdonal@wpi.edu
authors.forename: Cagdas D
authors.initials: CD
authors.lastname: Onal
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rus
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D032701:Biomimetics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D006244:Hardness; D008124:Locomotion / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D012212:Rheology / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012371:Robotics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012911:Snakes / Q000502:physiology*