Soft Robotics: Research, Challenges, and Prospects

The soft robot is a kind of continuum robot, which is mainly made of soft elastic material or malleable material. It can be continuously deformed in a limited space, and can obtain energy in large bending or high curvature distortion. It has obvious advantages such as high security of human-computer interaction, strong adaptability of unstructured environment, high driving efficiency, low maintenance cost, etc. It has wide application prospects in the fields of industrial production, defense military, medical rehabilitation, exploration, and so on. From the perspective of the bionic mechanism, this paper introduces the soft robots corresponding to insect crawling, snake crawling, fish swimming, elephant trunk, arm, etc. According to different driving modes, the soft robots can be classified into pneumatic-hydraulic driven, intelligent material driven, chemical reaction driven, and so on. The mechanical modeling, control strategy, material, and manufacturing methods of soft robot are summarized, and the application fields of soft robot are introduced. This paper analyzes the main challenges faced by the research on the key technologies of soft robots, summarizes and analyzes them, and puts forward the prospects for the future research of soft robots. The development trend of the future is to develop the soft robot with the characteristics of microscale, rigid-flexible coupling, variable stiffness, multifunctional, high integration, and intelligence of driving sensor control.