A study of dynamics and communication mechanism for ICPF actuating tortoise-like micro-robot

In the paper, our preliminary work in using ICPF to develop a novel tortoise-like flexible micro-robot with four legs and one tail is reported, which can crawl and swim underwater. ICPF is the abbreviation of ionic conducting polymer gel film which is a kind of smart film and can give large and fast bending displacement in the presence of a low applied voltage in wet condition. For controlling and analyzing easily the robot, we establish the micro-robot´s tail dynamic model by applying pseudo-rigid-body-dynamic-model (PRBDM). Then, the frequency analysis of a micro-robot based on PRBDM is investigated. The relation between the robot tail´s displacement and the electrical voltage´s frequency f is theoretically derived and the simulation result for the tail´s displacement is performed. Based on the characteristics of the micro bio-robots actuated by ICPF, a short-distance multi-hop communication mechanism is designed and can be used to constitute a wireless sensor network. In the mechanism, every peer only restores one-hop peers in its routing table, which is so small that the search speed and network efficiency is increased. In addition, data is transmitted by multiple paths. The network resources are made adequate use. The reliability of the network is increased, too. Thus, the network consisted of micro-robots can be established quickly and flexibly.