Versatile Motion Generation of Magnetic Origami Spring Robots in the Uniform Magnetic Field

Magnetic soft robots have attracted widespread attention for their untethered, remotely operated, and compliant deformation characteristics. Earlier work has demonstrated magnetic origami robots' diverse locomotion capabilities. This letter will focus on the motion generation and open-loop control of an untethered magnetic flexible robot with a stretch-twist coupling origami spring (OS) skeleton only using uniform magnetic field control. We investigate the associated motion generation mechanism and the corresponding control signals for the magnetic spring robot (MSR). The MSR can perform in-plane crawling (
Worm Crawling
) and perpendicular in-plane crawling (
Crab Crawling
) under two-dimensional magnetic signal inputs. Moreover, the OS's stretch-twist coupling characteristic is utilized to achieve axial
Rolling Motion
with axial magnetization configuration. We further experimentally tested the performance of three motions with average normalized velocities of 0.34
$\pm$
0.039(body length/s), 0.054
$\pm$
0.0066(body length/s), and 1.46
$\pm$
0.069(body length/s), respectively.