Dynamic Walking with a Soft Limb Robot

We present a novel soft limb quadruped robot “FASTT,” with a simple and cheap design of its legs for dynamic locomotion aimed to expand the applications of soft robotics in mobile robots. The pneumatically actuated soft legs are self-stabilizing, adaptive to ground, and have variable stiffness, all of which are essential properties of locomotion that are also found in biological systems. We tested the soft legs for the pace, trot, and gallop gait and found them to move with a forward velocity for each gait with robustness. The legs were able to produce a flight and stance phase as a result of the body-environment interaction and also support the weight of the body while two legs were in flight phase and two in stance phase. The soft robot also exhibited two different postures i.e. sprawl and semi-erect which can also be found in some biological species as the crocodile. Moreover, the robot is safe to interact with. The results highlight the effectiveness of the soft limbs to produce dynamic locomotion which provides potential for application in uncertain environments.