Transport and Delivery of Objects with a Soft Everting Robot
Ethan DeVries, Jack Ferlazzo, Mustafa Ugur, Laura H. Blumenschein

TL;DR
This paper explores how soft everting robots can be used to transport and deploy various payloads, demonstrating their capabilities in complex terrains and with payloads up to 1.5kg, highlighting their potential for hazardous environment applications.
Contribution
It introduces models and experimental validation for payload deployment and transport using soft everting robots, expanding their functional capabilities beyond exploration.
Findings
Transported payloads up to 1.5kg in weight.
Moved through apertures with 0.01cm clearance.
Carried out discrete turns up to 135 degrees.
Abstract
Soft everting robots present significant advantages over traditional rigid robots, including enhanced dexterity, improved environmental interaction, and safe navigation in unpredictable environments. While soft everting robots have been widely demonstrated for exploration type tasks, their potential to move and deploy payloads in such tasks has been less investigated, with previous work focusing on sensors and tools for the robot. Leveraging the navigation capabilities, and deployed body, of the soft everting robot to deliver payloads in hazardous areas, e.g. carrying a water bottle to a person stuck under debris, would represent a significant capability in many applications. In this work, we present an analysis of how soft everting robots can be used to deploy larger, heavier payloads through the inside of the robot. We analyze both what objects can be deployed and what terrain…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
