A Highly Mobile Crawling Robot Inspired by Hexapod Insects Rescue robots are usually used in security and disaster investigating missions. Yet the complex control and actuation systems make them very heavy and expensive. This paper proposed a novel crawling robot named HIbot inspired by hexapod insect with low cost, light weight and simple control. Both movable body and leggedwheel were adapted to achieve fixable movement of the robots with one DC motor and no extra control. A series of experiments demonstrated that the HIbot can crawl in various outdoor environments such as gravel, grassland, etc. It can cross obstacles that are as high as 2.8 times of the radius of the leggedwheel. Such characteristics give the robot a great potential in applications.

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.