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.

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.