Soft Beam Climbing Robot

I designed and built a beam climbing soft robot that required only a single constant pressure input to locomote.

Beam Climbing Soft Robot

Most air actuated soft robots rely on hard control components to generate and control the airflow that governs thier movement. However, limits the complaince, simplicity and affordability of these soft robots.

At the Harvard SEAS Research Experience for Undergraduates, I designed and built a soft, beam climbing robot that does not rely on hard components to generate control signals. It utilizes a soft ring oscillator that transforms a single constant pressure input and outputs three oscillating ouputs. My work demonstrated how this ring oscillator could be used to control a robot performing useful tasks like basic cleaning and maintenance

Paper

  • A Buckling-Sheet Ring Oscillator for Autonomous Locomotion [DOI] [PDF]
    Won-Kyu Lee, Daniel J. Preston, Markus P. Nemitz, Amit Nagarkar, Arthur K. MacKeith, Benjamin Gorissen, Nikolas Vasios, Vanessa Sanchez, Katia Bertoldi, L. Mahadevan, and George M. Whitesides. Science Robotics. 2022.
  • Video Demonstrations

    The attached hose provides a single constant pressure of ~10kPa. The pieces of blue tape on the beam in all figures are 10cm apart.