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. Inspired by natural animals, which evolved optimal body shapes along with strong motion propulsion methods, DEAs appeared to be promising in the abilities in various space, researchers introduced delicate field of centimeter scale robots in free water space for their structures and mechanisms to robots to realize multimodal large strain and fast response abilities [14].