Underwater and Surface Aquatic Locomotion of Soft Biomimetic Robot Based on Bending Rolled Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

Abstract

All-around, real-time navigation and sensing across the water environments by miniature soft robotics are promising, for their merits of small size, high agility and good compliance to the unstructured surroundings. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a mantas-like soft aquatic robot which propels itself by flapping-fins using rolled dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) with bending motions. This robot exhibits fast-moving capabilities of swimming at 57mm/s or 1.25 body length per second (BL/s), skating on water surface at 64 mm/s (1.36 BL/s) and vertical ascending at 38mm/s (0.82 BL/s) at 1300 V, 17 Hz of the power supply. These results show the feasibility of adopting rolled DEAs for mesoscale aquatic robots with high motion performance in various water-related scenarios.