Research on design and jumping performance of a new water-jumping robot imitating water striders

At present, the research of robots imitating water strider is mainly focusing on imitating the skating movement of the insects. In contrast, the jumping motion of water striders needs a sufficiently large driving force to lift the body detaching from the water surface, which is easy to break the hydrophobic property of the material and result in the sinking of the robot, so there is few research on the water-jumping robots. This paper designed a new water-jumping robot using hydrophobic material as legs and springs as energy storage devices. By establishing the force model of the robot, the forces exerted on supporting legs and the jumping property of the robot were analyzed and simulated separately. Then the robot was fabricated by 3D printing technology, the parameters affected the jumping performance were verified through a series of experiments. Based on the above analysis and experiments, the structure of the robot was optimized. The optimized robot weighed 12.2g and jumped 50mm high.