Abstract: Unlike most animals, plants fail to move bodily at will. However, movements also occur in every single part of plants out of energy and nutrients needs, spanning from milliseconds to hours on a time scale. And with the growing understanding of plant movement in the academic community, bionic soft robots based on plant movement principles are increasingly studied and are considered by scientists as a source of inspiration for innovative engineering solutions. In this paper, through the study of the biological morphology, microstructure, and motion mechanism of the flytrap, we developed chambered design rules, and designed and fabricated a gas-driven bionic flytrap blade, intending to investigate its feasibility of performing complex bending deformation. The experimental result shows that the bionic flytrap blade can achieve multi-dimensional bending deformation, and complete the bending and closing action within 2 s. The performance of the bionic flytrap blade fabricated is in high agreement with the real flytrap blade in terms of bending and deformation, achieving an excellent bionic design effect. In this study, the chambered design rules of the bionic flytrap blade were proposed and developed, and the possibility of its deformation was investigated. The effects of different chamber types and different flow channel design precepts on the bending deformation of the bionic flytrap blade were revealed, together with the relationship between the response time and flow rate of the bionic flytrap blade. At last, this study provides new ideas for the study of plant blade motion mechanism in a hope to expand the application fields of bionic robots, especially hope to offer solutions for plant-type robotics.

Key words: Gas drive , · Bionic soft flytrap blade , · Feasibility test , · Plant bionic design