An Integrated Compliant Fabric Skin Softens, Lightens, and Simplifies a Mesh Robot

Abstract

Earthworms are particularly skilled at navigating through confined spaces. Therefore, creating a soft robot that mimics their peristaltic locomotion could provide unique advantages for pipe inspection, search and rescue, exploration, and medical applications. Here we present the design of a new robot, FabricWorm, that like its predecessor, CMMWorm, has six segments that are actuated with circumferential cables sequentially to mimic the peristaltic motion in an earthworm. However, compared to its predecessor, FabricWorm is 41% softer, is 23% lighter, and has 64% fewer rigid structural components due to the integration of the mesh within a fabric skin. These improvements, and the benefit of a continuous fabric skin, can be important advantages for worm-like robots.