mCLARI: A Shape-Morphing Insect-Scale Robot Capable of Omnidirectional Terrain-Adaptive Locomotion in Laterally Confined Spaces
Heiko Kabutz, Alexander Hedrick, William P. McDonnell, Kaushik Jayaram
Abstract
Soft compliant microrobots have the potential to deliver significant societal impact when deployed in applications such as search and rescue. In this research we present mCLARI, a body compliant quadrupedal microrobot of 20mm neutral body length and 0.97g, improving on its larger predecessor, CLARI. This robot has four independently actuated leg modules with 2 degrees of freedom, each driven by piezoelectric actuators. The legs are interconnected in a closed kinematic chain via passive body joints, enabling passive body compliance for shape adaptation to external constraints. Despite scaling its larger predecessor down to 60 % in length and 38% in mass, mCLARI maintains 80% of the actuation power to achieve high agility. Additionally, we demonstrate the new capability of passively shape-morphing mCLARI - omnidirectional laterally confined locomotion - and experimentally quantify its running performance achieving a new unconstrained top speed of ~3 bodylengths/s (60 mms-1). Leveraging passive body compliance, mCLARI can navigate through narrow spaces with a body compression ratio of up to 1.5 × the neutral body shape.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2023_mclariashapemorp,
title = {mCLARI: A Shape-Morphing Insect-Scale Robot Capable of Omnidirectional Terrain-Adaptive Locomotion in Laterally Confined Spaces},
author = {Heiko Kabutz and Alexander Hedrick and William P. McDonnell and Kaushik Jayaram},
booktitle = {IROS 2023},
year = {2023}
}