Climbot-Ω: A Soft Robot with Novel Grippers and Rigid-compliantly Constrained Body for Climbing on Various Poles
Manjia Su, Yu Qiu, Yisheng Guan, Haifei Zhu, Zhi Liu
Abstract
Soft climbing robots have been attracting increasing attention in soft robotics community, and a lot of prototypes been proposed with basic climbing function implemented. Climbing on poles is a challenge with soft robots, and the capability of current pole-climbing soft robots needs to be improved in terms of adaptability to various poles and deformation controllability or constraining of the soft body. In this paper, a rigid-compliant coupling or constraint method is proposed in design of pole climbing robots. Specifically, a novel gripper with inner expanding bubbles and a rigid-compliant belt is presented and designed, featured with excellent shape/size-adaptability and grip-reliability. To constrain undesired deformation of the soft body, rigid-compliant belts are also adopted. Three rigid-compliant constrained actuators are connected to implement an Ω-shaped deformation of the body for climbing motion. The kinematic feature of the body is established, and the two main features of the inner expanding gripper are analyzed. A series of experiments, where the robot climbs on poles with different shapes and sizes and in different poses, have verified the effectiveness of the presented rigid-compliant constraint and the shape/size adaptability and grip-reliability of the novel inner expanding grippers.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2021_climbotasoftrobo,
title = {Climbot-Ω: A Soft Robot with Novel Grippers and Rigid-compliantly Constrained Body for Climbing on Various Poles},
author = {Manjia Su and Yu Qiu and Yisheng Guan and Haifei Zhu and Zhi Liu},
booktitle = {IROS 2021},
year = {2021}
}