Bio-inspired soft jellyfish robot: a novel polyimide-based structure actuated by shape memory alloy

Abstract

A novel flexible polyimide-based soft jellyfish robot actuated by shape memory alloy (SMA) was fabricated and the pulse and recovery process of the jellyfish has been mimicked. The existing SMA wire-embedded tentacle fabrication technique is a time-consuming and human-tiring process. The proposed structure is novel, cost-effective, and easy to fabricate with very less time consumption compared to conventional mold-based methods. The behavior of the proposed jellyfish structure has been investigated with varying SMA wire diameters and frequencies. The jellyfish tentacle displacement and velocity during mimicking were measured. The temperature modeling of SMA embedded structure and deflection modeling using beam bending theory has been performed. In addition, a preliminary simulation of the jellyfish mimicking has been carried out in Ansys Fluent and the thrust force has been evaluated. The results show that the proposed method can be successfully applied to mimic jellyfish locomotion and extended to underwater applications. The initial prototype has been developed with an onboard camera module and sonar sensor for object detection application with a watertight PDMS bell structure. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.