Research On Biomimetic Pneumatic Peristaltic Soft Robot

Soft robot is one of the hot points in robot research.Because the soft robot has strong environmental adaptability,good flexibility,and can better imitate the movement of various soft animals,it has a wider application prospect than the robots composed of traditional rigid materials.In the study of soft robot,the bionic soft crawling robot which imitate soft animals is one of the most important research areas.This kind of soft robot has many potential applications because it can move in many special environments.According to the hydrostatic structure of soft animals and the structure of earthworm,a kind of imitation earthworm soft robot is proposed in the paper.The design,manufacture and the actuated strategy of soft robot are studied.Firstly,a kind of soft actuator was designed to simulate the circular muscle and longitudinal muscle by analyzing the hydrostatic structure of earthworm.It is composed of an elongated actuator and a radial actuator,which can simulate the antagonistic relationship between the axial and radial directions of the hydrostatic structure.Secondly,the actuator is briefly analyzed by geometrical relations,the factors which influence the deformation characteristics of the actuator are preliminarily determined.The deformation characteristics and influencing factors of the soft actuators are studied using the ABAQUS.The soft actuators with different size parameters are made.The relationship between the deformation characteristics of the actuators and various size parameters are studied in the pneumatic experiments on these soft actuators.Thirdly,through the analysis of the structure and crawling mechanism of the earthworm,the structure of bionic earthworm soft robot is designed.The crawling conditions of soft robot are obtained by mechanically analyzing.Based on the structure and crawling conditions of the robot,the actuated strategies are designed.It includes two kinds of actuated strategies for plane crawling and one actuated strategy for pipeline crawling.Finally,a soft robot experimental platform was set up.The tests of soft robot prototypes are implemented on the plane and in the pipeline.Through the results of tests,the actuated strategies of soft robot are proved.