Direct Observation of Gastropod's Locomotion for Soft Robot Application

In this paper, snail’s crawling motion was precisely observed and measured to understand the mechanism of its special locomotion. The locomotion has been focused on not only biological researchers but also engineers. Snails can crawl on rough surfaces with obstacles, and also can climb up even on vertical walls. These features are highly useful for applications in the field of soft robotics. We prepared an experimental setup for direct observation of the locomotion. A snail was put on a soft gel substrate, and the deformation of the substrate was measured by tracking marker particles dispersed under the surface of the substrate. At the same time, deformation of the snail’s sole was also obtained by tracing the marker particles which was embedded in the snail as fluorescent tattoo. It is essential to obtain these data at the same time to verify the reported locomotion theory. A similar observation was performed with a soft magnetic crawling robot, and we compared these data, which would be helpful to design bio-mimic soft robots like snails.