Terrain Adaptability and Optimum Contact Stiffness of Vibro-bot with Arrayed Soft Legs

The terrain adaptability of the state-of-the-art robot is far behind natural animals, partly because of limited sensing, intelligence, controlling, and actuating ability. One possible solution is to explore the flexible locomotion structure and locomotion mode with good adaptability and fault tolerance. Based on this idea, we presented a type of vibro-bot with arrayed soft legs (VBASL) with excellent terrain adaptability by utilizing the rapid vibration of the soft belt array. With the resistance to local terrain blocking and combing the vibrational actuation, the VBASL has an advantage of multi-leg collaboration, so that very simple structure can achieve good terrain adaptability, such as steady locomotion on complex terrains like steep slope, ladders, steps, discrete pillars, and soft sands. Besides, the effects of soft leg geometry, stiffness, and ground topography on terrain adaptability and locomotion speed were also studied, indicating the similar contact stiffness to maximize the locomotion speed on different grounds. Then, a theoretical model was developed to describe the experiments well, which can guide the design of optimum contact stiffness of VBASL to achieve fast locomotion speed and good load capacity. By further modifying the robot structure, more practical functions such as turning, climbing, and anti-impacting were easily realized. The resistance to local terrain blocking and optimum contact stiffness are two important factors to improve the performance of VBASL, which may address the terrain adaptability challenge of robots working in practical unstructured environments.