A novel underwater bipedal walking soft robot bio-inspired by the coconut octopus

Qiuxuan Wu; Xiaochen Yang; Yan Wu; Zhijun Zhou; Jian Wang; Botao Zhang; Yanbin Luo; Sergey A Chepinskiy; Anton A Zhilenkov

doi:10.1088/1748-3190/abf6b9

A novel underwater bipedal walking soft robot bio-inspired by the coconut octopus

Bioinspir Biomim. 2021 Jun 4;16(4). doi: 10.1088/1748-3190/abf6b9.

Authors

Qiuxuan Wu¹, Xiaochen Yang¹, Yan Wu¹, Zhijun Zhou¹, Jian Wang¹, Botao Zhang¹, Yanbin Luo¹, Sergey A Chepinskiy², Anton A Zhilenkov³

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Electrical Engineering, School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, People's Republic of China.
² Faculty of Control Systems and Robotics, ITMO University, St. Petersburg, Russia.
³ Institute of Hydrodynamics and Control Processes, Saint-Petersburg State Marine Technical University, Russia.

PMID: 33836505
DOI: 10.1088/1748-3190/abf6b9

Abstract

In order to increase the compatibility between underwater robots and the underwater environment and inspired by the coconut octopus's underwater bipedal walking, a method was proposed for bipedal walking for an underwater soft robot based on a spring-loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) model. Using the characteristics of octopus tentacles rolling on the ground, a wrist arm was designed using the cable-driven method, and an underwater SLIP bipedal walking model was established, which makes an underwater soft robot more suitable for moving on uneven ground. An underwater bipedal walking soft robot based on coconut octopus was then designed, and a machine vision algorithm was used to extract the motion information for analysis. Experimental analysis shows that the underwater bipedal walking robot can achieve an average speed of 6.48 cm s^-1, and the maximum instantaneous speed can reach 8.14 cm s^-1.

Keywords: U-SLIP; bipedal walking; cable drive; coconut octopus; soft robot; underwater robot.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Animals
Motion
Octopodiformes*
Robotics*
Walking