Earthworms, Snails and sea cucumbers move along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions. Snakes have four ways of moving around: Serpentine, Sidewinding, Caterpillar, and Concertina.

Alternative robotics, and in particular soft robots may be useful for navigating rough terrain or squeezing through tight spaces. We propose an alternative design to achieve such robotic creatures, combining all the methods of motion that the creatures mentioned above can achieve and much more by using piezo electric components (and a lot of trial & error!).

We will try to engineer a miniature, yet resilient, soft autonomous robot versatile enough for many applications and relatively cheap to build. The final goal is to crawl around in rough/wet terrain on a distance of at least 50m.