Mechanical Design and Experimental Analysis of a Soft Snake-like Robot Based on Bellows-type Soft Actuators *

This paper proposes a snake-like robot with two soft actuator modules in series, and its gait strategies are studied. Firstly, a bellows-type soft actuator was designed and then manufactured by the paraffin loss method. Secondly, the driving system is designed according to the fluid driving principle of the soft actuator, and the setting of critical parameters is studied. Finally, the structure of a soft snake-like robot is demonstrated, and two gait strategies are proposed. Experiments are carried out to test the motion speed of the robot when different gait strategies are applied. The results show that the soft snake-like robot achieves a speed of 11 mm/s (0.03 body length/s) when using the phase offset strategy without delay activation. This shows its application potential in search, detection, rescue, and other operations in a narrow environment.