I started with the “GoQBot” article (1) from my previous post. Finding it on the CMU Library website, I clicked the link to view papers cited in it. I found a brief article called “Caterpillar Kinematics” (2), which describes the evasive rolling maneuver caterpillars are capable of doing. This movement was the biological inspiration for the GoQBot’s movement.
I then used the CMU Library website again to find one of the 70 papers citing the article. One of these papers presented another soft robot (3), this one a small robot capable of swimming in and on top of water and to carry payloads. While it appears to be far smaller, this robot follows a similar form factor to the GoQBot with movement that mimics a caterpillar to a certain degree.
Using the CMU Library website from the same source paper again, I also found a paper presenting two robots capable of different forms of jumping (4). Both are biomimetic to a certain degree, but neither of them could be easily classified as “soft robots”. The robots presented exhibit a rolling jumping motion (somewhat similar to the caterpillar rolling technique), and a gliding jumping technique.
- Huai-Ti Lin, Gary G. Leisk, Barry Trimmer. GoQBot: A Caterpillar-Inspired Soft-Bodied Rolling Robot. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Volume 6, Issue 2. Pages 026007. April 2011. doi:10.1088/1748-3182/6/2/026007.
- John Brackenbury. Caterpillar Kinematics. Nature, Volume 390, Issue 6659. Page 453. 4 December 1997. doi:10.1038/37253.
- Wenqi Hu, Guo Zhan Lum, Massimo Mastrangeli, Metin Sitti. Small-Scale Soft-Bodied Robot with Multimodal Locomotion. Nature, Volume 554, Issue 7690. Pages 81-85. 1 February 2018. doi:10.1038/nature25443.
- Rhodri Armour, Keith Paskins, Adrian Bowyer, Julian Vincent, William Megill. Jumping Robots: a Biomimetic Solution to Locomotion Across Rough Terrain. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Volume 2, Issue 3. Pages S65-S82. June 2007. doi:10.1088/1748-3182/2/3/S01.