Design Methodology for Soft-Bodied Miniature Robot Locomotion

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Miniature soft material robots, which are untethered and small in overall size down to a few millimetre and even sub-millimeter size scale, are required to have multiple locomotion modes to navigate in complex environments, such as inside the human body. Such miniature soft robots toward medical use will be able to access to previously hard-to-reach or inaccessible human body sites with minimal invasion and implement medical operations safely and precisely. To create such novel miniature soft machines toward medical use, this research project aims to develop a systematic methodology for design, fabrication, and validation of miniature soft-bodied mobile robots with multimodal locomotion capabilities using magnetic soft elastomeric materials.To achieve such goal, our research objective in this proposal consists of three iterative steps. In the first step, we will design the soft-bodied robots to mimic the kinematics of different locomotion modes executed by various small-scale soft-bodied animals. We will start with an intuitive robot design and then develop a computational methodology that will systematically search for sub-optimal robot designs. In the next step, to realize the soft-bodied robot designs generated in the first step, we will advance the current fabrication techniques significantly for magnetic soft materials-based miniature soft robots and develop a method to fabricate three-dimensional geometries and magnetization profiles. In the final step, we will test and characterize achieved locomotion modes to assess their performance and also validate the developed locomotion dynamic models. The knowledge gathered in this step will be used as a guideline to improve design of the soft-bodied miniature robots and their overall multimodal locomotion performance in the next iterations.