Researchers develop earthworm-like soft-skin robot with bristles that help it crawl

Researchers have developed an unusual soft-skinned earthworm-like robot equipped with bristles that help it crawl. This soft surface is inspired by the earthworm’s epidermis and their bristles, with the bristles arranged in triangular and square lattices with two spatial densities for locomotion.

What the researchers found was that doubling the amount of bristles increased the robot’s speed by a factor of 1.78 for the triangular grid, although this is less pronounced for the rectangular grid by a small factor of 1.06. However, by increasing the activation stroke for the skin with the high-density triangular grid from 15% to 30%, the speed was increased from 0.5 to 0.9 mm/s. This study successfully demonstrated that a crawling robot equipped with a soft skin can traverse both a linear and a curved channel.