Design and Experiment of a Pneumatic Soft Climbing Robot

This paper designed a pneumatic soft climbing robot by utilizing the high flexibility of soft materials. Capabilities of climbing and creeping through small spaces would rarely possible with a method based only on rigid links. At first, according to the drive mode of pneumatic networks, a model for soft climbing robots with different section having their independent stiffness was designed; afterwards, the analysis of visco-mechanical properties of robots at the contact surface were provided by using the method of minimum potential energy; on the basis, finite element analysis and experiment are given to analyze the climbing behaviors of the robot; finally, by employing 3-d printing and layer-by-layer casting, a prototype soft climbing robot was prepared to perform climbing experiments. The research is expected to provide a new method for monitoring complex unstructured environments.