In soft robotics, a recent challenge is to decrease the number of rigid components used tocreate entirely soft robots. A common rigid component used in soft robots is the rigid encoder, which should ...be replaced with a soft counterpart if possible. In this work, we de-sign and manufacture a soft sensor, which is embedded into a C-shaped leg of a soft, legged, miniature robot. Our main goal is to show that we can embed a soft sensor into and receive contact feedback from a soft C-shaped leg of our soft miniature quadruped. We test various sensor parameters using custom test setups to analyze the soft sensor performance. Our soft sensor design is iterated by experimentally investigating several sensor shape options. For the C-leg of the soft miniature quadruped, optimal sensor geometry and position for the sensor implementation are found from a discrete design space as the outcome of this work. We received feedback from the soft sensor and compared commercial encoder data to the soft sensor embedded C-leg data. We managed to detect the rotation speed of the C-leg with the accuracy of 87.5% on a treadmill and with the accuracy of %86.7 under free rotation of the C-leg. However, if connection loss occurs in the miniature slipring mechanism, the error percentage in estimating the rotational speed increases significantly.
This work investigates the locomotion of a modular C-legged miniature robot with soft or rigid backbones on smooth, rough, and inclined terrain. SMoLBot-C is a C-legged miniature robot with soft or ...rigid backbones and foldable modules. The robot's climbing capabilities with soft and rigid C-legs and different backbones on rough terrain with obstacles and the robot's mobility on an inclined surface are compared. Our results show that the C-legged robot with soft legs and soft backbones can climb up to a higher obstacle, and walk on surfaces with higher inclination angles compared to the same robot with rigid legs and backbones, regardless of the number of modules (legs). Additionally, a velocity comparison study using SMoLBot-C operating at two different gaits is conducted. The results show that the robot with soft legs and compliant-I backbones operating with trot gait possesses the highest velocity compared to the other robots with similar leg numbers. Moreover, the effect of a compliant tail on the robot's locomotion on smooth and rough terrains is investigated, where the results show that the robot with the compliant tail is capable of walking on surfaces with higher inclination angles compared to the same robot without a tail. Furthermore, adding a tail to the two-legged SMoLBot-C doubles the maximum scalable obstacle height; the robot with a tail can climb up an obstacle 2 times higher than a module's height. Locomotion analysis in this manuscript provides a better insight into C-legged miniature robots' locomotion with soft or rigid legs while the modular connections' structural stiffness varies from rigid to soft.
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