枝や電線上で使用可能なイモムシ型ソフト・ロボット
A Caterpillar-inspired Soft-bodied Robot that Crawls on Branches and Wires Resiliently

2018年04月13日

我々の生活環境には、高所の細い枝や電線の上、茂みの中など、ヒトの重さや大きさではアクセスが難しい空間が無尽蔵に存在する。この空間を意のままに動き回る、安くて小型のロボットが実現できれば、その商用的・産業的価値は計り知れない。我々は、そのような空間で3億5千万年も生き抜いてきたイモムシに学び、柔らかいボディを活かし、多様な動きをシンプルに制御できるソフト・ロボットの開発を行っている。

 

There is vast and omnipresent space in our living and natural environments (e.g., on high and thin branches of trees, on electric lines, and inside a bush) to which a human or hard machine cannot access due to the weight and size. A small, cheap, and light-weight robot that is able to move around adaptively and resiliently in such space has huge potential as a next-generation IoT device or a smart matter. Caterpillars are excellent living models to design this vision, since they have evolved over millions of years to produce effective locomotion by orchestrating the large degrees of freedom in their deformable and continuum bodies without massively complex brains. Inspired by the animal, we are developing a soft-bodied robot that can be maneuvered by a simple controller.

 

Takuya Umedachi, Yoshihiro Kawahara

Contact: umedachi@akg.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp