PISRob: A Pneumatic Soft Robot for Locomoting Like an Inchworm

Rongzhen Xie, Manjia Su, Yihong Zhang, Mingjun Li, Haifei Zhu, Yisheng Guan

Abstract: Climbing or crawling robots may be widely applied in agriculture, forestry, military, construction industry, disaster searching and rescuing, and so on. Soft robots possess better safety, flexibility, dexterity, portability, and adaption to complex environments than traditional robots. However, there are big challenges in system development, modeling and control of soft climbing robots. To address system development of a soft robot as a new type climbing robot, we present a pneumatic soft robot capable of inchworm-like locomotion, PISRob. The presented robot is composed of three soft parts in H-shaped configuration. Each part is able to perform 2D bending. While the middle part, as the main body, can bend in Ω -shape for actuation, the two end parts as legs can conduct simple bending motion for grasping or anchoring during locomotion. The system design and fabrication process of the soft robot is presented in details in this paper. A control system is developed for pneumatic actuation of the robot. Tests are carried out to get the relationship between the actuating air pressure and the step length in locomotion. Experiments of crawling on a floor and climbing on a pole are performed to verify the feasibility of development of the new soft robot and the effectiveness of the control method for the pneumatic system.