A Soft Reconfigurable Inverted Climbing Robot Based on Magneto-Elastica-Reinforced Elastomer

This work presents a novel type of soft reconfigurable mobile robot with multimodal locomotion, which is created using a controllable magneto-elastica-reinforced composite elastomer. The rope motor-driven method is employed to modulate magnetics-mechanics coupling effects and enable the magneto-elastica-reinforced elastomer actuator to produce controllable deformations. Furthermore, the 3D-printed magneto-elastica-reinforced elastomer actuators are assembled into several typical robotic patterns: linear configuration, parallel configuration, and triangular configuration. As a proof of concept, a few of the basic locomotive modes are demonstrated including squirming-type crawling at a speed of 1.11 mm/s, crawling with turning functions at a speed of 1.11 mm/s, and omnidirectional crawling at a speed of 1.25 mm/s. Notably, the embedded magnetic balls produce magnetic adhesion on the ferromagnetic surfaces, which enables the soft mobile robot to climb upside-down on ferromagnetic curved surfaces. In the experiment, the inverted ceiling-based inverted crawling speed is 2.17 mm/s, and the inverted freeform surface-based inverted crawling speed is 3.40 mm/s. As indicated by the experimental results, the proposed robot has the advantages of a simple structure, low cost, reconfigurable multimodal motion ability, and so on, and has potential application in the inspection of high-value assets and operations in confined environments.