Scaling Up Soft Robotics: A Meter-Scale, Modular, and Reconfigurable Soft Robotic System

Shuguang Li, Samer A. Awale, Katharine E. Bacher, Thomas J. Buchner, Cosimo Della Santina, Robert J. Wood, Daniela Rus

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

21 Citations (Scopus)
83 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Today's use of large-scale industrial robots is enabling extraordinary achievement on the assembly line, but these robots remain isolated from the humans on the factory floor because they are very powerful, and thus dangerous to be around. In contrast, the soft robotics research community has proposed soft robots that are safe for human environments. The current state of the art enables the creation of small-scale soft robotic devices. In this article we address the gap between small-scale soft robots and the need for human-sized safe robots by introducing a new soft robotic module and multiple human-scale robot configurations based on this module. We tackle large-scale soft robots by presenting a modular and reconfigurable soft robotic platform that can be used to build fully functional and untethered meter-scale soft robots. These findings indicate that a new wave of human-scale soft robots can be an alternative to classic rigid-bodied robots in tasks and environments where humans and machines can work side by side with capabilities that include, but are not limited to, autonomous legged locomotion and grasping.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)324-336
JournalSoft Robotics
Volume9
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work

Keywords

  • legged locomotion
  • modular robotics
  • soft actuators
  • soft grasping
  • soft robotics

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