Locomotion of a kirigami-skinned soft crawler

Nature offers many examples of slender limbless organisms that take advantage of both the flexibility of their body and the frictional properties of their skin to efficiently move and explore the surrounding space. Inspired by the friction-assisted locomotion of snakes, we design a pneumatically actuated soft crawling robot combined with a stretchable kirigami skin with tunable frictional properties. We demonstrate that the flexibility and the directional friction anisotropy of the skin are two main factors affecting the locomotion efficiency of soft crawlers. By integrating the potentials of kirigami-inspired architected materials, the proposed design significantly simplifies the inputs required for actuation of soft robots.