Go to DBLP homepageLoco-sheet: Morphing Inchworm Robot Across Rough-terrain
Abstract: Inchworm, a kind of caterpillar, traverses various terrains by moving its center of mass (COM) with simple two-anchor crawling locomotion. Because of this advantage, many soft locomotion robots were developed to mimic this inchworm-like two-anchor crawling. However, most of these developed inchworm robots have difficulties in moving its COM in the vertical height direction, so these robots face difficulties in overcoming discrete high terrain, like stairs. In this paper, we propose a flexible sheet-based inchworm robot (Loco-sheet) that employs a novel locomotion mode made by morphing to overcome discrete high terrains, like stairs. In this novel mode, called the S-shape locomotion mode, the robot changes its body shape into an ` S' to lift the COM up, by exploiting bending stiffness of the flexible sheet to climb stairs. The bending stiffness of the sheet was designed to be sufficient to lift up the COM. The robot also does two-anchor crawling, called the omega-shape locomotion mode, to pass through low gaps. Loco-sheet is designed with anisotropic friction wheels and a mass distribution advantageous for omega-shaped locomotion without slippage. Morphing between two modes is reversible. Motor-tendon driven actuation system allows the robot to pull the far end of the sheet from the actuator to fold the body, and allows the robot to operate untethered from an external power supply with small volume actuators. The robot climbs a 90 mm stair, passes through 72 mm low gaps, and travels flat surfaces. Therefore, Loco-sheet is suitable for traveling a variety of undefined environments.
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