Swimming locomotion of Soft Robotic Snakes
This work addresses efficient swimming for soft robotic snakes in marine environments, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing soft robotics and snake locomotion research.
The study tackled the problem of optimizing swimming locomotion for soft robotic snakes by developing a dynamic model with hydrodynamic forces and identifying optimal bending propagation, resulting in high potential for marine applications.
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a new type of snake robots made from compliant and structurally deformable modules. Leveraging the controllable large bending, these robots can naturally generate various snake locomotion gaits. Here, we investigate the swimming locomotion of soft robotic snakes. A numerically efficient dynamic model of the robot is first derived. Then, a distributed contact modal is augmented to incorporate hydrodynamic forces. The model is then numerically tested to identify the optimal bending propagation for efficient swimming. Results show that the soft robotic snakes have high potential to be used in marine applications.