Energy Harvesting in Soft Robot Locomotion with Complex Dynamics

There has been a lot work in the last decade examining the locomotion principles and properties of mobile soft robots. In terms of energy efficiency, it has also been found that most mobile soft robots reported in the literatures are still in need of improvement. Along the direction, a possible approach to increase the energy efficiency is through the ability to harvest the energy used during the locomotion. The main goal of the paper is to investigate the most important principles to harvest energy in soft robot locomotion with complex and rich dynamics. By observing the energy harvesting ability in a vibration induced soft locomotion with complex dynamics, it is found that the ability to harvest higher voltages does not necessarily lead to a higher energy efficiency. Instead, the ability to harvest a proper amount of voltages at a suitable moment is shown to be more important. These primary findings pave the way of maximizing energy efficiency in soft robot locomotion through energy harvesting.