A Novel Rescue Robot: Hybrid Soft and Rigid Structures for Narrow Space Searching We propose a novel rescue robot with hybrid soft and rigid structures, it is designed particularly for narrow space searching. The whole design focuses on improving the mobility and reliability to make it more applicable to disaster relief work. The rescue robot has highly integrated design, it is composed of two annular grippers with partially rigid structure, a soft actuator and a soft bending joint. Specially, we introduce selfadaptive structures to enable the robot to travel through different size of passages and maintain its current position when needed. The rescue robot is pneumatic, and 4meterlong tube is used as container of air tubes and wires, which is sufficient for search area requirements in most situations. The performance of the rescue robot is evaluated by an artificial disastrous environment. It is proved that the rescue robot can successfully move forward in the disastrous environment. Moreover, the rescue robot can climb in an inclined acrylic pipe at a maximum angle of 25xc2xb0.

Research on a Tubular Climbing Robot Induced by Tritube Soft Actuators In this paper, a pipe robot consisted of iris expansion mechanism and tritube soft actuators, which simulates insect crawling mode, is proposed. We used 3Dprinting technology to fabricate the main structure of the robot. For displaying the detail working mechanism, the movement process diagram has been proposed. In order to identify the working ability, we investigated the operation space of the guiding mechanism based on equal continuous hypothesis and the adhesive output of the iris mechanism. The related performance experiments have been carried out to verify the analysis as well. Our results showed that the robot fixed by iris mechanism to the pipe could adapt to pipes with various diameters ranging from 80 to 120 mm (about 1.5 times as its original size). The guiding mechanism composed of three hoses driven by motors was easy to bend 90 degrees, which satisfied the curved pipe environments. The biggest characteristic of our robot is the flexible structure and adhesive methods, which gets rid of the limitation of air source and air pipe to the robot.