Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and navigate through tight spaces. These robots have the potential to be used for various applications, such as search and rescue, inspection, surveillance, and more. The state-of-the-art still faces many challenges, including limited degrees of freedom, a lack of diversity in gait trajectories, insufficient limb dexterity, and limited payload capabilities. To address these challenges, we develop a modular soft-limbed robot that can mimic the locomotion of pinnipeds. By using a modular design approach, we aim to create a robot that has improved degrees of freedom, gait trajectory diversity, limb dexterity, and payload capabilities. We derive a complete floating-base kinematic model of the proposed robot and use it to generate and experimentally validate a variety of locomotion gaits. Results show that the proposed robot is capable of replicating these gaits effectively. We compare the locomotion trajectories under different gait parameters against our modeling results to demonstrate the validity of our proposed gait models.

翻译：腿部运动是软体机器人领域中极具前景但研究尚不充分的子领域。软体机器人的柔性肢体具有诸多优势，包括能够调节冲击、耐受跌倒以及穿越狭窄空间。这类机器人可应用于搜索救援、检测、监控等多种场景。当前技术仍面临诸多挑战，包括自由度受限、步态轨迹多样性不足、肢体灵活性欠缺以及承载能力有限。为解决这些问题，我们开发了一种可模仿鳍脚类动物运动的模块化软体机器人。通过模块化设计方法，我们旨在实现自由度提升、步态轨迹多样化、肢体灵活性增强及负载能力改善。我们推导了该机器人的完整浮动基座运动学模型，并基于该模型生成及实验验证了多种运动步态。结果表明，所提机器人能够有效复现这些步态。通过对比不同步态参数下的运动轨迹与建模结果，我们验证了所提步态模型的有效性。