Added mass energy recovery of octopus-inspired shape change

Octopus-inspired robotics

Octopus-Inspired Innovative Suction Cups

Octopus show great adhesion capabilities thanks to their suckers covering their ventral side of their arms. Starting from biological investigation, we identified preliminary specifications for the design of innovative artificial suction cups, which could be used in the field of soft robotics. The main features of the biological sucker are maintained as leading criteria for the choice of the act...

Bipedal Walking of an Octopus-Inspired Robot

In this paper a model is presented which describes an octopusinspired robot capable of two kinds of locomotion: crawling and bipedal walking. Focus will be placed on the latter type of locomotion to demonstrate, through model simulations and experimental trials, that the robot’s speed increases by about 3 times compared to crawling. This finding is coherent with the performances of the biologic...

Soft Robot Arm Inspired by the Octopus

The octopus is a marine animal whose body has no rigid structures. It has eight arms composed of a peculiar muscular structure, named a muscular hydrostat. The octopus arms provide it with both locomotion and grasping capabilities, thanks to the fact that their stiffness can change over a wide range and can be controlled through combined contractions of the muscles. The muscular hydrostat can b...

Ultra-fast escape maneuver of an octopus-inspired robot.

We design and test an octopus-inspired flexible hull robot that demonstrates outstanding fast-starting performance. The robot is hyper-inflated with water, and then rapidly deflates to expel the fluid so as to power the escape maneuver. Using this robot we verify for the first time in laboratory testing that rapid size-change can substantially reduce separation in bluff bodies traveling several...