Related Experiment Video
Updated: Dec 19, 2025

Design and Fabrication of an Elastomeric Unit for Soft Modular Robots in Minimally Invasive Surgery
Published on: November 14, 2015
Leveraging elastic instabilities for amplified performance: Spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots
Yichao Tang1,2, Yinding Chi2, Jiefeng Sun3
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Temple University, 1947 North 12th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
Abstract:
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of spine-inspired fast and strong soft machines. Unlike most current soft robots that are designed as inherently and unimodally stable, our design leverages tunable snap-through bistability to fully explore the ability of soft robots to rapidly store and release energy within tens of milliseconds. We demonstrate this generic design principle with three high-performance soft machines: High-speed cheetah-like galloping crawlers with locomotion speeds of 2.68 body length/s, high-speed underwater swimmers (0.78 body length/s), and tunable low-to-high-force soft grippers with over 1 to 103 stiffness modulation (maximum load capacity is 11.4 kg). Our study establishes a new generic design paradigm of next-generation high-performance soft robots that are applicable for multifunctionality, different actuation methods, and materials at multiscales.
Related Concept Videos
Elastic Strain Energy for Shearing Stresses
Elastic Strain Energy for Normal Stresses
If...
Stability of structures
Elasticity in Concrete
Cell-matrix's Response to Mechanical Forces
Anchoring junctions mechanically attach a cell to the...
Mechanical Systems

