Design and Modeling of a Parallel-Pipe-Crawling Pneumatic Soft Robot

Design and control of a soft, shape-changing, crawling robot

Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape profiles using minimal actuators. The shape changing ability is also a potential tool to manipulate friction forces caused by contact with the environment. These ad...

Design, Development, Dynamic Analysis, and Control of a Pipe Crawling Robot

Well functioning water networks are essential to the sustainability of a community. Large transmission and distribution water mains are often the most sensitive components of these networks since their failure can be catastrophic. Furthermore, due to the high cost of these pipes, the system does not usually provide redundancy to enable decommission for maintenance and rehabilitation. Hence, fai...

Development of Pipe-Crawling Robot for Pipeline Network Discovery

Novel Design of a Soft Lightweight Pneumatic Continuum Robot Arm with Decoupled Variable Stiffness and Positioning

Soft robot arms possess unique capabilities when it comes to adaptability, flexibility, and dexterity. In addition, soft systems that are pneumatically actuated can claim high power-to-weight ratio. One of the main drawbacks of pneumatically actuated soft arms is that their stiffness cannot be varied independently from their end-effector position in space. The novel robot arm physical design pr...

Design of a Crawling Gait for a Modular Robot

In order to reduce the cost and development time of an all-terrain autonomous robot, a modular approach is used. The robot is designed as simple as possible by using one-degree-of-freedom modules that allow the platform to auto-reconfigure to use two different locomotion models inspired by biological systems: quadruped and crawling locomotion. The pros and cons of crawling are discussed and the...