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Abstract Soft robots have attracted increasing attention due to their excellent versatility and broad applications. In this article, we present a minimally designed soft crawling robot (SCR) capable of robust locomotion in unstructured pipes with various geometric/material properties and surface topology. In particular, the SCR can squeeze through narrow pipes smaller than its cross section and propel robustly in spiked pipes. The gait pattern and locomotion mechanism of this robot are experimentally investigated and analysed by the finite element analysis, revealing that the resultant forward frictional force is generated due to the asymmetric mechanical properties along the length direction of the robot. The proposed simple yet working SCR could inspire novel designs and applications of soft robots in unstructured narrow canals such as large intestines or industrial pipelines. 

Abstract We investigate the temporal accuracy of two generalized‐ schemes for the incompressible Navier‐Stokes equations. In a widely‐adopted approach, the pressure is collocated at the time stept_n + 1while the remainder of the Navier‐Stokes equations is discretized following the generalized‐ scheme. That scheme has been claimed to besecond‐order accurate in time. We developed a suite of numerical code using inf‐sup stable higher‐order non‐uniform rational B‐spline (NURBS) elements for spatial discretization. In doing so, we are able to achieve high spatial accuracy and to investigate asymptotic temporal convergence behavior. Numerical evidence suggests that onlyfirst‐order accuracyis achieved, at least for the pressure, in this aforesaid temporal discretization approach. On the other hand, evaluating the pressure at the intermediate time step recovers second‐order accuracy, and the numerical implementation is simplified. We recommend this second approach as the generalized‐ scheme of choice when integrating the incompressible Navier‐Stokes equations.