Exploiting Friction Anisotropy for Soft Robot Locomotion

Animals can utilize the friction anisotropy of their skin to traverse various substrates efficiently. Inspired by this, we explore different bio-inspired sawtooth-like surface structures on a soft crawling robot. Our results show the robot can crawl in different directions by exploiting friction anisotropy on the substrates and using only a single source of pressure for its pneumatic actuation.