Abstract
Investigators discuss new findings in robotics. According to news reporting out of Haifa, Israel, by NewsRx editors, research stated, “Nonskeletal animals such as worms achieve locomotion via crawling.” The news editors obtained a quote from the research from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology: “We consider them as an inspiration to design robots that help underline the mechanisms of crawling. In this paper, we aim to identify an approach with the simplest structure and actuators. Our robots consist of cut-and-fold bodies equipped with pneumatically-driven soft actuators. We have developed fabrication techniques for coin-sized robots. Experiments showed that our robots can move up to 4.5 mm/s with straight motion (i.e., 0.1 body lengths per second) and perform cornering and U-turns. We have also studied the friction characteristics of our robots with the ground to develop a multistate model with stick-slip contact conversions.” According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Our theoretical analyses depict comparable results to experiments demonstrating that simple and straightforward techniques can illustrate the crawling mechanism. Considering the minimal robots’ structure, this result is a critical step towards developing miniature crawling robots successfully.”
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