Their device, a silicone rod with a carbon-fibre spine, can leap 10ft high without legs. It is inspired by the movements of parasitic worms. The researchers made it after watching high-speed video of nematodes, a round worm, pinching themselves into odd shapes to fling themselves forward and backward.
Simulating Nematodes for Soft Robot Design
The team created simulations of the jumping nematodes. From this, they built soft robots to replicate the leaping worms’ behaviour, later reinforcing them with carbon fibres to accelerate the jump.
“Nematodes are amazing creatures with bodies thinner than a human hair,” said Sunny Kumar, lead coauthor of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE). “They don’t have legs but can jump up to 20 times their body length. That’s like me laying down and somehow leaping onto a three-story building.” They said their findings could help develop robots capable of jumping across various terrain, at different heights, in multiple directions.
How Nematodes' Kinks Inspire Jumping Soft Robots
Nematodes hop backwards by tightening the midpoint of their body to create a kink. The team found that the kinks allow the creature to store more energy with each jump and rapidly release it to leap forward. The study suggests that engineers could create simple elastic systems made of carbon fibre or other materials that could withstand and exploit kinks to hop across various terrain.
The Future of Jumping Robots and Soft Robot Development
“A jumping robot was recently launched to the moon, and other leaping robots are being created to help with search and rescue missions, where they have to traverse unpredictable terrain and obstacles,” Kumar said. “Our lab continues to find interesting ways that creatures use their unique bodies to do interesting things, then build robots to mimic them.”
