An intelligent spinal soft robot with self-sensing adaptability

• Published in: Innovation (New York, NY) NY), 2024-07, Vol.5 (4), p.100640-100640, Article 100640
• Main Authors: Gong, Shoulu, Fang, Fuyi, Yi, Zhiran, Feng, Bohan, Li, Anyu, Li, Wenbo, Shao, Lei, Zhang, Wenming
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2666-6758; 2666-6758
• DOI: 10.1016/j.xinn.2024.100640

Self-sensing adaptability is a high-level intelligence in living creatures and is highly desired for their biomimetic soft robots for efficient interaction with the surroundings. Self-sensing adaptability can be achieved in soft robots by the integration of sensors and actuators. However, current strategies simply assemble discrete sensors and actuators into one robotic system and, thus, dilute their synergistic and complementary connections, causing low-level adaptability and poor decision-making capability. Here, inspired by vertebrate animals supported by highly evolved backbones, we propose a concept of a bionic spine that integrates sensing and actuation into one shared body based on the reversible piezoelectric effect and a decoupling mechanism to extract the environmental feedback. We demonstrate that the soft robots equipped with the bionic spines feature locomotion speed improvements between 39.5% and 80% for various environmental terrains. More importantly, it can also enable the robots to accurately recognize and actively adapt to changing environments with obstacle avoidance capability by learning-based gait adjustments. We envision that the proposed bionic spine could serve as a building block for locomotive soft robots toward more intelligent machine-environment interactions in the future. [Display omitted] •Intelligent spinal robots coupling sensing, recognition, and active adaption.•A bionic spine with integrated sensing and actuation in one shared device.•A design concept highly scalable for various robots for active environmental adaption and obstacle avoidance purposes.