Bio‐Inspired Pneumatic Modular Soft Robots

ABSTRACT Traditional rigid robots struggle to adapt to complex settings such as post‐disaster rescue and pipeline inspection. To address this limitation, we propose a spiral actuator and a bending actuator based on the extensile McKibben artificial muscles. By adjusting the wrapping angle of the reinforcing fibers, the actuator can switch between bending deformation and spiral deformation. In addition, theoretical models are proposed to predict the deformation behavior of the actuators and verified by experiments. These actuators function as modular components for constructing soft robots with diverse capabilities. In this paper, four different modular soft robots are designed including a vine‐inspired spiral gripper, an octopus‐inspired soft gripper, a snake‐inspired crawling robot, and a monkey‐inspired double‐rods crawling robot. Experiments demonstrate the significant potential of modular soft robots for performing tasks such as maintenance, detection, surveillance, and manipulation in diverse unstructured environments.