Modeling of the supporting legs for a water-jumping robot mimicking water striders

摘要

The performance of the robot mimicking water striders is mainly influenced by the driven mechanism, trajectory of actuating legs and hydrophobic property of the material. Clarify the forces exerted on the hydrophobic legs helps optimize the rowing trajectory and performance of the water striders. Limited by the complex fluid dynamics on air-water interface and the lack of the relevant theories, the analysis is mainly focused on the static forces, the research on hydrodynamic forces is still challengeable. In this paper, we firstly built theoretical force models of the hydrophobic supporting legs, then a force platform was designed to verify the models, a series of experiments were carried out to measure the actual forces. The experiment results can provide empirical parameters for the biomimetic surface water strider robot motion theory.