Bioinspired locomotion and grasping in water: the soft eight-arm OCTOPUS robot

M Cianchetti, M Calisti, L Margheri, M Kuba, C Laschi
2015 Bioinspiration & Biomimetics  
The octopus is an interesting model for the development of soft robotics, for its high deformability, dexterity and rich behavioural repertoire. To investigate the principles of octopus dexterity, we designed an eight-arm soft robot and evaluated its performances with focused experiments. The OCTOPUS robot presented here is a completely soft robot, which integrates eight arms extending in radial direction and a central body which contains the main processing units. The front arms are mainly
more » ... for elongation and grasping, while the others are mainly used for locomotion. The robotic octopus works in water and its buoyancy is close to neutral. The experimental results show that the octopus-inspired robot can walk in water using the same strategy as the animal model, with good performance over different surfaces, including walking through physical constraints. It can grasp objects of different size and shape, thanks to its soft arm materials and conical shape.
doi:10.1088/1748-3190/10/3/035003 pmid:25970014 fatcat:h5oqbjah6bhi3jnclxmiujozci