Fig. 5: Morphing a robot’s body enables multimodal terrestrial locomotion.

a The adaptive quadruped robot has three main parts: three parallel 2D-bending SMMs, four continuum legs, and two body connectors to connect the SMMs and legs. b The bending angle of the robot’s body with respect to time during the morphing process. The three distinct shapes correspond to the robot’s body shape for crawling, walking, and horizontal climbing, respectively. The solid line indicates the mean of three experiments, and shaded region shows one standard deviation from the mean. c The quadruped robot’s different locomotion modes exhibit different body widths and heights to accommodate the environmental constraints, resulting in different locomotion speeds. d Morphing the robot’s body allows it to crawl under a glass, walk to a bridge, climb horizontally along the bridge, and then walk to a target point before finally recovering its original shape.