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Title: Leveraging elastic instabilities for amplified performance: Spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of spine-inspired fast and strong soft machines. Unlike most current soft robots that are designed as inherently and unimodally stable, our design leverages tunable snap-through bistability to fully explore the ability of soft robots to rapidly store and release energy within tens of milliseconds. We demonstrate this generic design principle with three high-performance soft machines: High-speed cheetah-like galloping crawlers with locomotion speeds of 2.68 body length/s, high-speed underwater swimmers (0.78 body length/s), and tunable low-to-high-force soft grippers with over 1 to 10 3 stiffness modulation (maximum load capacity is 11.4 kg). Our study establishes a new generic design paradigm of next-generation high-performance soft robots that are applicable for multifunctionality, different actuation methods, and materials at multiscales.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2010717 2005374
PAR ID:
10198360
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Science Advances
Volume:
6
Issue:
19
ISSN:
2375-2548
Page Range / eLocation ID:
eaaz6912
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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