mCLARI: a shape-morphing insect-scale robot capable of omnidirectional terrain-adaptive locomotion in laterally confined spaces

TL;DR

mCLARI is a compact, shape-morphing insect-scale robot that uses passive compliance for omnidirectional, terrain-adaptive locomotion in confined spaces, achieving high agility and speed despite its small size.

Contribution

This work introduces mCLARI, a scaled-down, shape-morphing quadrupedal microrobot with passive compliance, enabling terrain adaptability and high-speed navigation in narrow environments.

Findings

Achieves a top speed of 3 body lengths per second (60 mm/s).

Can passively morph shape to navigate confined spaces with 1.5x compression.

Maintains 80% of actuation power despite size reduction.

Abstract

Soft compliant microrobots have the potential to deliver significant societal impact when deployed in applications such as search and rescue. In this research we present mCLARI, a body compliant quadrupedal microrobot of 20mm neutral body length and 0.97g, improving on its larger predecessor, CLARI. This robot has four independently actuated leg modules with 2 degrees of freedom, each driven by piezoelectric actuators. The legs are interconnected in a closed kinematic chain via passive body joints, enabling passive body compliance for shape adaptation to external constraints. Despite scaling its larger predecessor down to 60 percent in length and 38 percent in mass, mCLARI maintains 80 percent of the actuation power to achieve high agility. Additionally, we demonstrate the new capability of passively shape-morphing mCLARI - omnidirectional laterally confined locomotion - and experimentally quantify its running performance achieving a new unconstrained top speed of 3 bodylengths/s (60 mms-1). Leveraging passive body compliance, mCLARI can navigate through narrow spaces with a body compression ratio of up to 1.5x the neutral body shape.