Reconfigurable, Multi-Material, Voxel-Based Soft Robots

Voxel-based robots are aggregations of soft and simple building blocks that have been extensively evolved and simulated to perform various tasks, like walking, jumping or swimming. However, real-life voxel-based robots are rather scarce because of their challenging design and assembly. With the curr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 8; no. 3; pp. 1255 - 1262
Main Authors: Legrand, Julie, Terryn, Seppe, Roels, Ellen, Vanderborght, Bram
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.03.2023
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Assembling
Bonding strength
Covalent bonds
Evolutionary robotics
Faces
Grippers
Heating systems
Legged locomotion
Manufacturing engineering
Mechanical properties
methods and tools for robot system design
Plastics
Reconfiguration
Robot kinematics
Robots
Simulation
soft robot materials and design
Soft robotics
Swimming
ISSN:2377-3766, 2377-3766
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Voxel-based robots are aggregations of soft and simple building blocks that have been extensively evolved and simulated to perform various tasks, like walking, jumping or swimming. However, real-life voxel-based robots are rather scarce because of their challenging design and assembly. With the current materials and assembling methods, the interfaces between the soft multi-material voxels are prone to failure. This work proposes to make voxels out of reversible Diels-Alder polymers, which are available in a broad range of mechanical properties. By doing so, the covalent bonds at the multi-material interface ensure strong chemical connections, while allowing for reconfiguration. A first voxel-based gripper is thus robustly assembled, then disassembled, using its pieces (voxels) for reassembling another robot, i.e. a voxel-based walking robot. This reconfigurable property allows iterative validation of the simulated voxel-based robots and fine-tuning of the simulations parameters in a sustainable and economical way. Both physical voxel-based robots show similar behaviors as their simulations with root-mean-square errors down to 10.4%.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2023.3236883