Designing a Soft Flat Crawling Robot With High Load Capacity

Traditional soft crawling robots have many disadvantages, including their complex structure, difficulty in manufacturing, and low load capacity. Inspired by the art form of kirigami, we opted to design a soft, flat crawling robot using only simple, fast laser cutting technology and a weaving method in this study. The robot mainly consists of two components: a piece of skin with scales and a flat balloon, which are weaved orthogonally to each other. The fully formed robot weighs only 5g, and the scales can tilt up after the balloon inflates. All the scales are distributed on one side of the robot, increasing the load capacity. The expansion of the balloon ensures that the robot becomes contract coupled. With the anisotropic friction provided by the scales, the robot can now crawl forward. This experimental work demonstrates that the crawling efficiency can be improved by choosing the appropriate pressure waveform. By shortening the period of the pressure waveform, the crawling speed can also be significantly improved. In terms of loading, the robot still has a high crawling ability when carrying a load over 400 times its weight.