Bionic Sea Urchin Robot with Foldable Telescopic Actuator
This work addresses the challenge of designing compact, adaptable robots for applications like exploration or surveillance, though it appears incremental in combining existing telescopic actuator and bio-inspired concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of creating a bio-inspired sea urchin robot with foldable spines for versatile locomotion, resulting in a prototype that can propel by extending spines and roll by hiding them inside a spherical body, as validated through simulations and experiments.
This paper presents a couple of interesting ideas: a telescopic actuator design and a bio-inspired sea urchin robot. The "spines" of the sea urchin robot consist of fourteen telescopic actuators equally distributed over it's spherical body. The telescopic actuation system integrates linked 3D printed rack articulations that are locked in all axes if the pinion moves the links in a forward direction, creating a solid and rigid rack. Thus, the robot is able to propel and move by extending its spines. On the other hand, if the pinion moves the rigid articulations backward, these are unlocked and can be folded in a minimal space, enabling the bionic sea urchin robot to hide its spines inside its constrained spherical-body and be able to roll. Simulations and experiments are presented from both, the sea urchin robotic prototype and different scales of the telescopic actuation system.