Agile and Adaptable Assembled Swimming of Biomimetic Modular Soft Robots

초록

In soft robotics, agile and adaptable collective motion has been challenged due to sophisticated path programming of individual soft robots. Herein, we present multimodal collective swimming of musculoskeletal system-mimetic soft robots which can control vorticity of fluids. For agile locomotion with lightweight body, the architecture of soft robot consists with nanoporous carbon nanotube yarn (CNTY) filled with magnetic polymer composites, mimicking spongy bone and surrounding skeletal muscle[JJW4] . Under a pulsed rotating electromagnetic field, single magnetic soft robots swim with rectilinear translational motility or rotational motility according to the rotational frequency of the magnetic field. Multiple soft robots articulate with other soft robots owing to magnetic attraction, enabling the assembled swimming. The multiple soft robots are adaptably organized and competition between magnetic attractive force and fluid drag result in trimodal assembly: assembled rectilinear translational swimming, assembled rotational swimming, and interactive vibrational swimming. We will discuss collective swimming of the modular soft robots which can clean hundreds of microbeads and transport multiple semi-submerged millimeter-scale beads.