Paper Info
Title
Enabling earthworm-like soft robot development using bioinspired IPMC-scissor lift actuation structures: Design, locomotion simulation and experimental validation
Abstract
The paper parents our recent development on the earthworm-like soft robot. The robot is designed through combination of smart electro-active polymer (EAP) materials and the efficient expandable structure. The employed EAP material, called ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) that can directly provide the actuation to the expendable scissor-lift structure, so as to enable the robot to mimic locomotion mechanism of the earthworm. To reach the goal of the project, in this paper, we firstly developed a high performance IPMC driver for the IPMC actuators embedded in the mimicking robot system, and then based on the proposed three 2-D earthwormlike locomotion structures that consist of different complex forms of IPMC actuators and expendable lift-scissor structures, several peristaltic motion behavior simulations were conducted in order to compare the locomotion advantages of three designed soft robot structures. In addition, preliminary experimental results on one of designed structures are demonstrated and all simulation and experimental results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our biomimetic design. Ongoing work is focusing on the dynamic modeling and control of the more segmented and dimensional earthworm-like robot using the designed actuation mechanism.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/ROBIO.2015.7418817
2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO)
Keywords
Field
DocType
earthworm-like soft robot development,ionic polymer-metal composite,bioinspired IPMC-scissor lift actuation structure,smart electroactive polymer,EAP material,earthworm locomotion mechanism,motion behavior simulation
Lift (force),Robotic systems,Simulation,Robot kinematics,Control engineering,System dynamics,Engineering,Robot,Actuator
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sanku Niu121.39
Yudong Luo243.17
Yantao Shen344.12
Kwang J. Kim400.34