• CN: 11-2187/TH
  • ISSN: 0577-6686

Journal of Mechanical Engineering ›› 2021, Vol. 57 ›› Issue (19): 1-20.doi: 10.3901/JME.2021.19.001

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Review of Actuation, Modeling and Simulation in Soft-legged Robot

NIU Lizhou, DING Liang, GAO Haibo, YANG Huaiguang, SU Yang, LI Nan   

  1. State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150080
  • Received:2020-10-07 Revised:2021-03-25 Online:2021-10-05 Published:2021-12-13

Abstract: Soft-legged robots have attracted more and more attention from researchers due to their superior mobility and trafficability through the complex terrain. Because of the limitations of material, actuation and manufacturing technique, how to realize the innovative structural design of the soft-legged robot, to improve the speed and capacity of the soft-legged robot is one of the urgent problems to be solved. Firstly, the review systematically expounds the state of art of soft-legged robots from the perspectives of bionic structure and actuation methods. Since most of the soft robots have continuous deformable structures, coupled with the physical nonlinearity of soft materials and the geometric nonlinearity of soft structure deformation, mechanical modeling and simulation have always been the bottleneck in the field of soft robot research. Combing the main modeling theories of soft robots, summarizing the modeling and control methods of soft manipulators, these theories and methods are further extended to the system modeling of soft-legged robots. The application of conventional commercial software and the development of physical simulation engines are introduced, and the main approaches of virtual simulation of soft robots are analyzed. The application and future research directions of soft-legged robots are prospected.

Key words: soft-legged robot, actuation, mechanical modeling, simulation

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