Swimming locomotion of Soft Robotic Snakes

TL;DR

This paper develops a dynamic model for soft robotic snakes to analyze their swimming locomotion, demonstrating their potential for marine applications through numerical simulations of optimal bending strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a new dynamic model for soft robotic snakes that includes hydrodynamic forces, enabling analysis of swimming gaits and efficiency optimization.

Findings

Soft robotic snakes can generate effective swimming gaits.

The model identifies optimal bending propagation for efficient swimming.

Potential applications in marine environments are promising.

Abstract

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.