A Multimodal Soft CrawlingClimbing Robot with the Controllable Horizontal Plane to Slope Transition * Most of the existing soft locomotive robots are capable of moving on horizontal planes and smallangled slopes, but few of them can accomplish the largeangled slope climbing or wall climbing. We introduce an inchworm inspired soft crawlingclimbing robot capable of continuous motion from a horizontal plane to a slope of up to 75 degrees and it can perform multiple locomotion including crawling, climbing, and the transition between them. This soft crawlingclimbing robot is powered by three pneumatic actuators connected in series that deforms with two degrees of freedom, negative pressure sucker feet that generate periodical adhesion, and a semiautomatic controlling system synchronizing the body shape and anchoring of the feet. The robot mimics the body deformation and feet anchoring pattern exhibited by inchworms and can be applied in inspection, surveillance, and rescuing.

Inchworminspired soft climbing robot using microspine arrays Animals in nature, such as geckos, inchworms, and felines can climb on various surfaces using different mechanisms and serve as references for the study of bioinspired robots. This paper presents an inchworminspired climbing robot that consists of soft body and feet. The soft robot is actuated by shape memory alloy wires and utilizes microspine arrays to attach its feet to rough or soft surfaces. A series of experiments to test the functionality of the feet and torso of the designed robot have verified the theoretical feasibility of the robot. Results have shown that the designed bioinspired robot can climb on inclined or vertical curved surfaces and flat surfaces. The robot can also adapt to the underwater environment. Thus, this robot has great potential for various applications such as pipeline inspection.