I started with an article called “A Multimodal Soft Crawling-Climbing Robot with the Controllable Horizontal Plane to Slope Transition” that was first written in 2019. The authors of the paper, Y. Zhang, L. Ge, J. Zhou, H. Xu and G. Gu created an inchworm-inspired soft robot that can climb planes up to a 75 degree angle. I scrolled down to the references section and picked one of the papers that it cited. The paper I found was called “Design and control of an inchworm-inspired soft robot with omega-arching locomotion.” The connection between the two papers are obvious. Both are about making inchworm soft robots, but the newer paper has the added innovation of the worm being able to climb extremely slanted slopes / walls. The root paper was written in 2017, so it is fairly recent. However, when I scrolled down to see what papers cited it, there were 19. The four papers I took a closer look at were “A Soft Phneumatic Crawling Robot with Unbalanced Inflation,” “A soft actuator with integrated pneumatic source using electrically induced liquid-to-gas conversion,” “Soft Robotics: Morphology and Morphology-inspired Motion Strategy” and “Origami Pump Actuator Based Pneumatic Quadruped Robot (OPARO).” It seemed that there was a common theme among them of the movement of soft robots.
Source
Y. Zhang, L. Ge, J. Zou, H. Xu and G. Gu, “A Multimodal Soft Crawling-Climbing Robot with the Controllable Horizontal Plane to Slope Transition,” 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China, 2019, pp. 3343-3348, doi: 10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968297.
Root
H. Guo, J. Zhang, T. Wang, Y. Li, J. Hong and Y. Li, “Design and control of an inchworm-inspired soft robot with omega-arching locomotion,” 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Singapore, 2017, pp. 4154-4159, doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989477.
Related Works
N. Wang, M. He, Y. Cui, Y. Sun and P. Qi, “A Soft Pneumatic Crawling Robot with Unbalanced Inflation,” 2020 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), Boston, MA, USA, 2020, pp. 138-143, doi: 10.1109/AIM43001.2020.9158925.
Y. Xu, T. Wang and Z. Wang, “A soft actuator with integrated pneumatic source using electrically induced liquid-to-gas conversion,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), Sanya, China, 2021, pp. 249-254, doi: 10.1109/ROBIO54168.2021.9739313.
F. Xu and H. Wang, “Soft Robotics: Morphology and Morphology-inspired Motion Strategy,” in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. 1500-1522, September 2021, doi: 10.1109/JAS.2021.1004105.
Y. Kim, Y. Lee and Y. Cha, “Origami Pump Actuator Based Pneumatic Quadruped Robot (OPARO),” in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 41010-41018, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3065402.