Leveraging elastic instabilities for amplified performance: Spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots

• DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz6912
• Publication Date: 2020-05-08T23:16:03Z
• Authors: Yichao Tang; Yinding Chi; Jiefeng Sun; Tzu-Hao Huang; Omid H. Maghsoudi; Andrew Spence; Jianguo Zhao; Hao Su; Jie Yin
• Keywords: Grippers; Soft Robotics

Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for variety spine-inspired fast strong machines. Unlike most current robots are designed as inherently unimodally stable, our leverages tunable snap-through bistability to fully explore the ability rapidly store release energy within tens milliseconds. We demonstrate this with three high-performance machines: High-speed cheetah-like galloping crawlers speeds 2.68 body length/s, high-speed underwater swimmers (0.78 length/s), low-to-high-force grippers over 1 103 stiffness modulation (maximum load capacity is 11.4 kg). Our study establishes new paradigm next-generation applicable multifunctionality, different actuation methods, materials at multiscales.