Mechanical Design and Motion Study of a Magnetically Controlled Bionic Crawling Robot

As a new type of robot made of flexible materials, soft robots have significant potential for applications in biomedicine, space exploration and search and rescue due to their excellent flexibility, adaptability and suppleness. However, the currently published magnetically controlled soft robots generally have simpler structures and shorter motion steps. Therefore, the aim of this work is to optimize the gait of magnetically controlled soft robots and increase their motion step. We designed a magnetic field-driven inchworm-like soft robot and established the corresponding dynamics model. The effects of different structural size parameters on the robot's motion step were investigated and optimized using genetic algorithms. Through finite element simulation and experimental study, we compared the optimized solution and verified the significant improvement of the improved magnetically controlled soft body robot in terms of motion rate and structural stability, which provides a basis for further optimization in the future.