A soft robot that adapts to environments through shape change

Nature provides several examples of organisms that utilize shape change as a means of operating in challenging, dynamic environments. For example, the spider Araneus Rechenbergi [1, 2] and the caterpillar of the Mother-of-Pearl Moth (Pleurotya ruralis) [3] transition from walking gaits to rolling in an attempt to escape predation. Across larger time scales, caterpillar-tobutterfly metamorphosis enables land to air transitions, while mobile to sessile metamorphosis, as observed in sea squirts, is accompanied by radical morphological change. Inspired by such change, engineers have created caterpillar-like rolling [4], modular [5, 6, 7], tensegrity [8, 9], plant-like growing [10], and origami [11, 12] robots that are capable of some degree of shape change. However, progress toward robots which dynamically adapt their resting shape to attain different modes of locomotion is still limited. Further, design of such robots and their controllers is still a manually intensive process. Despite the growing recognition of the importance of morphology and embodiment on enabling intelligent behavior in robots [13], most previous studies have approached the challenge of operating in multiple environments primarily through the design of appropriate control strategies.