abstract
- This study presents the design of a soft elastomeric skin, utilizing two commonly used materials in soft robotics: Ecoflex 00¿30 and Ecoflex 00¿50. The design includes two variants¿a flat configuration and a variant with a trapezoidal kirigami pattern. The aim is to explore the potential of these materials in creating versatile and adaptive skin structures for both, hard and soft robotics applications. These soft skins were used to cover a snake¿arm robot conformed by compliant vertebrae and controlled with cables. The impact of the soft elastomeric skins on the mobility of the snake-arm robot during planar bending motion was assessed by measuring the bending angle and monitoring the current consumption of the motors. These measurements aimed to evaluate how the presence of the elastomeric skins affected the robot¿s flexibility and energy efficiency. It was found that not only the presence or absence of a kirigami pattern changes the effect of the skin over the robot, but also its weight. These results open the path to the development of a waterproof skin for a snake-like aquatic robot in future work. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.