Abstract
Most untethered magnetic soft robots are controlled by a continuously applied magnetic field. The accuracy of their motion depends completely on the accuracy of external magnetic field, consequently any slight disturbance may cause a dramatic change. Here, we report a new structure and driven method design to achieve a novel magnetic soft robot, which can achieve accurate and stable locomotion with weakly dependence on the magnetic field. The robot consists of functional magnetic composite materials with one central transportation platform and four crawling arms, whose motion is mainly based on hyperelastic buckling and recovering of the arms. The robot is capable of cargo transportation with multimodal locomotion, such as crawling, climbing and turning with high adaptability to various surfaces. The robot consumes much less driven energy compared to conventional magnetic robots. Moreover, we develop theoretical and numerical models to rationally design the precisely controlled robot. Our study shows applications in terms of transportation functions, such as for optical path adjustments and photographic tasks in complex circumstances. This work also provides new ideas on how to utilize nonlinear deformation more efficiently, one could combine the benefits for both the flexible electronics and actuation applications.
Nonlinear Deformation Synthesis via Sparse Principal Geodesic Analysis