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A First: 3D-Printed, Squishy Four-Legged Robot Can Climb Over Obstacles

Mechanical engineers from the University of California San Diego say they have created the first soft robot that can walk on rough surfaces, like sand and pebbles. Their 3D-printed, four-legged robot can climb over obstacles and walk on various terrains. This type of robot could be ideal for capturing sensor readings in dangerous environments or for search and rescue. While tethered, the robot was successfully tested on large rocks, inclined surfaces, and sand. It was also able to transition from walking to crawling into an increasingly confined space. Its legs are made up of three parallel, connected sealed inflatable chambers, or actuators, 3D-printed from a rubber-like material. The chambers are hollow on the inside, so they can be inflated. On the outside, the chambers are bellowed, which allows engineers to better control the legs' movements.

Topics:
Automation Defense Manufacturing & Prototyping Motion Control Rapid Prototyping & Tooling Robotics

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    Transcript

    00:00:09 designing a robot to climb over rough terrain poses as a challenging problem here we present a quadrupedal robot with soft pneumatic legs capable of navigating unstructured Terrain in order to avoid the challenges of molding soft legs capable of rotation about multiple axes we developed an approach to the design of soft legs that can be directly printed on a commercial 3D printer the

    00:00:28 soft legs naturally conform to their surroundings during operation resulting in a robot with the ability to crawl through a variety of terrains with limited computation and no sensing capabilities the legs of the quadrip are mounted on the body in the shape of an X so it can achieve omnidirectional Locomotion by sequencing the input of pressurized air into each of the soft

    00:00:47 pneumatic Chambers the robot can move forwards backwards rotate in place and move sideways many previous approaches have used rigid legs which are not always able to conform to Natural environments we tested the performance of the quadruped with different leg configurations gate sequences and over various terrains the robot was able to successfully navigate over large Rocks

    00:01:07 Under inclined surfaces and over small Pebbles walking at speeds up to 20 mm/ second