BactoBot: A Low-Cost, Bacteria-Inspired Soft Underwater Robot for Marine Exploration
Traditional rigid underwater vehicles pose risks to delicate marine ecosystems due to high-speed propellers and rigid hulls. This paper presents BactoBot, a low-cost, soft underwater robot designed for safe and gentle marine exploration. Inspired by the efficient flagellar propulsion of bacteria, BactoBot features 12 flexible, silicone-based arms arranged on a dodecahedral frame. Unlike high-cost research platforms, this prototype was fabricated using accessible DIY methods, including food-grade silicone molding, FDM 3D printing, and off-the-shelf DC motors. A novel multi-stage waterproofing protocol was developed to seal rotating shafts using a grease-filled chamber system, ensuring reliability at low cost. The robot was successfully tested in a controlled aquatic environment, demonstrating stable forward propulsion and turning maneuvers. With a total fabrication cost of approximately $355 USD, this project validates the feasibility of democratizing soft robotics for marine science in resource-constrained settings.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
From Shallow Waters to Mariana Trench: A Survey of Bio-inspired Underwater Soft Robots
Sample Exploring the ocean environment holds profound significance in areas such as resource exploration and ecological protection. Underwater robots struggle with extreme water pressure and often cause noise and damage …
An Open Toolkit for Underwater Field Robotics
Underwater robotics is becoming increasingly important for marine science, environmental monitoring, and subsea industrial operations, yet the development of underwater manipulation and actuation systems remains restrict…
Bioinspired underwater soft robots: from biology to robotics and back
The ocean vast unexplored regions and diverse soft-bodied marine organisms have spurred interest in bio-inspired underwater soft robotics. Recent advances have enabled new capabilities in underwater movement, sensing, an…
DiffAqua: A Differentiable Computational Design Pipeline for Soft Underwater Swimmers with Shape Interpolation
The computational design of soft underwater swimmers is challenging because of the high degrees of freedom in soft-body modeling. In this paper, we present a differentiable pipeline for co-designing a soft swimmer's geom…
Unified Structural-Hydrodynamic Modeling of Underwater Underactuated Mechanisms and Soft Robots
Underwater robots are widely deployed for ocean exploration and manipulation. Underactuated mechanisms are advantageous in aquatic environments because reducing actuator count lowers motor-leakage risk while introducing …