The Glaucus: A soft robot quadruped by gianteye

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

The Glaucus, named after the Blue Sea Slug (Glaucus Atlanticus), is an open source soft robotic quadruped from Super-Releaser { http://superreleaser.com }. It is a proof of concept for a method developed at Super-Releaser that can reproduce nearly any geometry modeled on the computer as a seamless silicone skin. The company hopes to apply these same techniques to practical problems in medicine and engineering as the technology develops.
The quadruped has hollow interior chambers that interdigitate with one another. When either of these chambers is pressurized it deforms and bends the structure of the robot. This bending produces the walking motion. It is similar to how a salamander walks, by balancing itself on one pair of legs diagonal from one another while moving the opposite pair forward.
UPDATE 8.16.16 - Glaucus development has been moved to this page https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1695577 Please refer to it for fabrication details and use its comment threads to post issues and discoveries.
UPDATE 1.17.15 - I've uploaded the body, combined, and internal geometry as stl's so people can download and print bots based on the Glaucus that don't use the same molding.
For more details:
Video of the Glaucus in action - http://youtu.be/RCEzuPKgK6c
The complete tutorial on what to do with these files - http://learn.adafruit.com/soft-quadruped-robot-glaucus
More info on Super-Releaser - http://superreleaser.com/about-us/
More information about the methods behind these robots - http://har.ms/b/CMA
Photos of the process - https://flic.kr/s/aHsjVkYNy2