Diverse Behaviors of a Single-Motor-Driven Soft-Bodied Robot Utilizing the Resonant Vibration of 2D Repetitive Slit Patterns

This paper presents a vibration robot driven by a single motor that produces various behaviors by exploiting the deformable beams’ resonance phenomenon. The experiments using the prototypes demonstrate that the behavior can be switched by changing the motor’s vibration frequency. This research shows the benefits of selecting a material for the soft-bodied robot whose hardness can be easily adjusted and whose viscosity is not dominant. With this approach, more degrees of freedom can be controlled by simply designing the body’s stiffness distribution without increasing the number of actuators.