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  4. Unleashing Soft Modular Robots by means of a Bio-inspired Connection Strategy
 
conference paper

Unleashing Soft Modular Robots by means of a Bio-inspired Connection Strategy

Zappetti, Davide  
•
Stewart, William John  
•
Boutot, Maxime
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April 4, 2022
2022 Ieee 5Th International Conference On Soft Robotics (Robosoft)
5th International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)

Untethering can allow soft modular robots to move from the laboratory test bench into realistic environments and commercial use. However, today’s state of the art soft modular robots remain electrically connected to external power sources and controllers. The reason for this is that current electrical connections between modules induce rigidity into the soft robot, eliminating the advantages of being soft or can have high electrical resistance making communication and power exchange among modules impractical. To overcome this, we present a new bio-inspired inter-module connection strategy that connects soft modules mechanically and electrically without sacrificing the high deformability of the robot nor the low electrical resistance. We show that our strategy allows connected modules to retain stiffness in the same order of magnitude as individual modules while providing low electrical resistance. This enabled us to develop two untethered soft modular tensegrity robots, a gripper capable of holding two times its body weight and grasp objects of different shapes and a crawler that can move up to 4.5cm/min.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/RoboSoft54090.2022.9762069
Author(s)
Zappetti, Davide  
Stewart, William John  
Boutot, Maxime
Floreano, Dario  
Date Issued

2022-04-04

Publisher

IEEE

Publisher place

New York

Published in
2022 Ieee 5Th International Conference On Soft Robotics (Robosoft)
ISBN of the book

978-1-6654-0828-8

Start page

553

End page

558

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
5th International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)

Edinburgh, Scotland

April 4-8, 2022

Available on Infoscience
April 7, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/186898
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