Abstract
By investigating the biological locomotion mechanism of natural earthworms, an anchoring-advancing principle has been proposed and a new prototype of micro earthworm-like robots has been designed, fabricated and tested. A miniature piezoelectric linear stepper motor is introduced into the robot actuation. Specialized micro needles are boned to the robot serving as the anchoring points. The prototype dimension is 4.8mm×6.0mm×14.0mm. Preliminary tests have shown the effectiveness of the proposed locomotion principle with demonstration of the maximum characteristic speed of the prototype as approximately 0.36 body length per second, which is better than its natural counterpart. Fair climbing capability of the robot is also validated. Some factors such as surface roughness and hardness are found relevant to the locomotive performance of the robot. Speed and position control of the robot is easily achieved thanks to high accuracy controller.
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Zhou, M., Tao, Y., Cheng, L., Liu, Wt., Fu, X. (2013). A Biomimetic Earthworm-Like Micro Robot Using Nut-Type Piezoelectric Motor. In: Lee, J., Lee, M.C., Liu, H., Ryu, JH. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8102. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40852-6_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40852-6_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40851-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40852-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)