A Soft Robot Based on Magnetic-Pneumatic Hybrid Actuation for Complex Environments

Soft robots show greater medical and industrial application value for their potential miniaturization, inherent compliant softness, and adaptability to unstructured environments than conventional rigid counterparts. However, it remains challenging to simultaneously guarantee carrying load capacity and moving flexibly in unstructured environments and confined spaces. In the present work, we propose a novel magnetic-pneumatic hybrid-actuated soft robot for locomotion in unstructured environments. This robot design yields multiple degrees of freedom, strong shape deformability, and great adaptability to irregular terrain and scenes with different slopes and roughness. Locomotion experiments on different environments were conducted to validate its performance. Our work pioneers a novel design and actuation approach for soft robots that show great potential in industrial and medical applications.