Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation
strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a
generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of
spine-inspired fast and strong soft machines. Unlike most current soft robots
that are designed as inherently and unimodally stable, our design leverages
tunable snap-through bistability to fully explore the ability of soft robots to
rapidly store and release energy within tens of milliseconds. We demonstrate
this generic design principle with three high-performance soft machines:
High-speed cheetah-like galloping crawlers with locomotion speeds of 2.68 body
length/s, high-speed underwater swimmers (0.78 body length/s), and tunable
low-to-high-force soft grippers with over 1 to 103 stiffness modulation
(maximum load capacity is 11.4 kg). Our study establishes a new generic design
paradigm of next-generation high-performance soft robots that are applicable
for multifunctionality, different actuation methods, and materials at
multiscales.

本研究提出了一种机械不稳定性的设计原则，利用可调谐的劈翻双稳性来实现软机器人的快速运动和强大操纵能力，成功开发出高速奔跑机器人，高速水下游泳机器人和可调节硬度的柔性机械手等多功能高性能软机器人，为下一代软机器人的设计提供新的设计范例。