Design and Mechanics of a Composite Wave-driven Soft Robotic Fin for Biomimetic Amphibious Robot

Bionic amphibious robots have important prospects in scientific, commercial, and military fields. Compared with traditional amphibious robots which use propellers/jets for aquatic medium and wheels/tracks for terrestrial medium, bionic propulsion method has great advantages in terms of manoeuvrability, efficiency, and reliability, because there is no need to switch between different propulsion systems. To explore the integrated driving technology of amphibious robot, a novel bio-inspired soft robotic fin for amphibious use is proposed in this paper. The bionic fin can swim underwater and walk on land by the same undulating motion. To balance the conflicting demands of flexibility underwater and rigidity on land, the undulating fin adopts a special combination of a membrane fin and a bending spring. A periodic longitudinal wave in horizontal direction has been found generating passively in dynamic analysis. To find the composite wave-driven mechanics, theoretical analysis is conducted based on the walking model and swimming model. A virtual prototype is built in ADAMS software to verify the walking mechanics. The simulation result reveals that the passive longitudinal wave is also periodical and the composite wave contributes to land walking. Finally, an amphibious robot prototype actuated by a pair of undulating fins has been developed. The experiments show that the robot can achieve multiple locomotion, including walking forward/backward, turning in place, swimming underwater, and crossing medium, thus giving evidence to the feasibility of the newly designed undulating fin for amphibious robot.