Analyses and Solutions for the Buckling of Thin and Flexible Electrostatic Inchworm Climbing Robots

• As the body of the robot has only 2.5 mm of thickness, it is more prone to buckling than any other flexible robots, making it the best example for the buckling problem.
• Based on the analyses, the paper proposes a buckling-free control strategy for the electrostatic robots.
• A prototype of climbing robot was developed to verify the analyses and solutions, weighing merely 29 g (excluding battery and control circuits). It successfully climbed up a vertical wall without buckling, carrying the payload of 0.4 N.

GrowHR, A Novel Soft Humanoid Robot with Bone-inspired Deformation Technology

• We made a significant breakthrough in the field of humanoid and bioinspired robotics. We successfully developed a novel bone-inspired deformable soft linkage based on pneumatic inflation structures and multidimensional stability mechanisms. Weighing just 350 grams, this linkage can achieve up to 315% extensibility while maintaining excellent load-bearing capacity, structural stability, and compliance. Leveraging this innovation, our team further developed the world’s first lightweight soft humanoid robot, named GrowHR, standing 1.36 meters tall and weighing only 4.5 kilograms, less than 20% of the weight of traditional humanoid robots of similar size.
• This groundbreaking research provides a new technological pathway for addressing safety and adaptability challenges in robotics. Potentially bringing robots from industrial use into everyday life, much like the friendly “Baymax” from the popular science fiction movie, Big Hero 6.