Selective Unit-Cell Actuation in Lattice Structures for Distributed Morphology in Soft Robots

Monolithic pneumatic unit cells embedded in curved-strut lattices achieve distributed morphology — bending, grasping, and locomotion — through spatial actuation patterns alone.

📄 IROS 2026 (accepted) • arXiv:2606.18704

Overview

A monolithic unit cell merges curved-strut lattice geometry with a bidirectional bellow actuator. Tiled into arrays and selectively pressurized, the lattice becomes a distributed actuation field — overall shape emerges from the spatial pattern of active vs. passive cells, not from a single actuator or rigid linkage.

Key results

  • Bending, grasping, and crawling locomotion from the same hardware via different actuation patterns
  • Scalable performance across tessellation sizes
  • Heterogeneous active/passive arrangements produce asymmetric deformation for locomotion

Grasping

Citation

Exley, T., Coutinho, A., Beccai, L.
Selective Unit-Cell Actuation in Lattice Structures for Distributed Morphology in Soft Robots.
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026. (accepted). arXiv:2606.18704