Multi-modal jumping and crawling in an autonomous, springtail-inspired microrobot

Springtails are tiny arthropods that crawl and jump. They jump by temporarily storing elastic energy in resilin elastic cuticular structures and releasing that energy to accelerate a tail, called a furca, propelling them in the air. This paper presents an autonomous, springtail-inspired microrobot that can crawl and jump. The microrobot has a mass of 980mg and stands 13mm tall, and has on-board sensing, computation, and power, enabling autonomy. The microrobot was designed with a super-elastic shape memory alloy (SMA) spring that is manually loaded to store elastic energy. The on-board sensing and computation triggers an actuator at the jump frequency range that unlatches the spring, launching the microrobot into the air at speeds up to 3.171ms
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. At the same time, the microrobot is capable of crawling, when actuated at frequencies lower or higher than the jump frequency range, demonstrating autonomous multi-modal locomotion. This work opens up new pathways toward autonomy in multi-modal microrobots.