Soft compact valve inducing self-excited vibration and its generation of traveling-wave

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a new valve system that switches the pressurized modes of three or more chambers by self-excited vibration instead of using electricity. Recently pneumatic soft robots developed actively which can move narrow environments by taking advantage of its flexibility. Generally, solenoid valves are required to drive pneumatic soft robots, but they are losing the original flexibility of the soft robots and also makes robots difficult to be used in the environment where explosion-proof performance is required. Therefore, we developed a new valve and checked its function by experiments. Finally, the validity of our proposing method was verified by implementing it on a pneumatic mobile robot generating traveling wave and realized the propulsion by single supply line without electricity.