SOFT ROBOTICS

REFERENCES

Ying Gao projects

POSSIBLE TOMORROWS

Possible tomorrows : interactive clothing with fingerprint recognition technology from ying gao on Vimeo.

NEUTRALITÉ : CAN’T AND WON’T

neutralité : can't and won't. facial expression recognition system embedded clothing - ying gao from ying gao on Vimeo.

FLOWING WATER, STANDING TIME

Flowing Water, standing time (2019) from Alexandre de Bellefeuille on Vimeo.

Lily Chambers lecture notes:

ROBOTICS MATERIALS

  • Actuars
  • Sensor
  • Transducers

TYPES OF ACTUATORS:

  • Fluid
  • Chemical
  • Electricity
  • Thermal

AIR

  • Compressed air is easily generated
  • It is environmentally benign
  • It is lightweight
  • It is essentially inviscid and thus allows rapid motion

DESIGN, FABRICATION AND RESULTING MULTISCALE ACTUATORS

ELASTICITY AND MEASURE

INFLATABLES

Our project

THERMOVYNIL: SOFT ROBOTIC SAMPLE PROCESS WITH CAMEO MACHINE

cara

bolas

Thermovinyl file DOWNLOAD

  • First of all, you must connect the Cameo machine to the computer, we gonna use Silhouette software.
  • Place the material on the plastic sheet beeing sure doesn't moves. Load the sheet with the matirial on the machine.
  • Open the file, previously exported on DXF, in Silhouette software.
  • Set up the menu. The parameters used are,

FOR THE BACKING PAPER:

  • Choose material (copy paper medium)
  • Adjust long knife parameter (1)
  • Force (1)
  • Speed(+ faster weaker cutting) we choose very fast because the material is so thin, 10

Once the parameters have been configured, click on SEND and finally UNLOAD

FOR THE VINYL:

  • The bright part of the material must be placed inwards
  • Iridescent Heat Transfer

make a sandwich as follows:

  • Under the vinyl, the shinny layer where there is the transparent plastic will be on the outside face.
  • our design cut it in baking paper
  • another layer of vinyl. again the matt side will be inside and the shinny will be on the outside.

we iron the layers between them and the iron put baking paper. unhook the transparent vinyl layer. We check that everything has been well attached. If not, we can iron the areas that need more heat again.


THERMOVYNIL LOT OF EXPERIMENTS

We wanted to try several of the suggestions that appear in Adriana's slides.

Pleating the surface to create a rotation

1

rotation1

The indications for the first are: - Spread the first layer of the vynil, with the bright part out - Above put the baking paper and vinyl making folds with both.

rotationproces1

2

rotation2

The second test is the same as the previous one, but the folds will only be made with vinyl. We tested different fold measures to see if it affected the rotation.

Neither test gave us a good result. We tested folds of different measures to see if that affected the passage of air. Perhaps the difficulty for the air to pass was because of the width of the strip and not because of the depth of the folds.

SOFT ROBOTIC CONTRACTION

OUR PROJECT

We have done two tests with contraction. In both we have used visco-elastic inside the vinyl.

In the first test, a rotation is sought.

In the second, the contraction of a volume.

contractionvolume

contractionproces

Contraction E.T hand

et

Motivated because the previous results, we wanted to make E.T's hand with the same method of contraction with rotation.

The result has not been good. The foam triangles that generate the rotation were cut to a smaller size than in the previous test, and also placed a little more separated ones to the others. We believe that this is the reason they do not make a good rotation. It may also affect the relationship between the measure of the triangle and the length of the finger.

Ironing to seal the vinyl with the difficult hand shape brought us many problems. That is why in the end we line the iron with the baking paper and later change the large iron for a small one. The other issue we had, was that the interior triangles were not visco-elastic but of a recycled material that we entrusted in the workshop. This material was made of a very weak plastic that melted with the minimum heat contact.

etproces

3D PRINTING AND CASTING

We design a mold to print on the 3D printer. Time did not allow us to continue with the process but here are the files.

DOWNLOAD THE FILE (It would be nice for a future manufacturing student to pick it up and carry it out.)

SILICONE

The Harvard inflatable soft exoskeleton glove appears to be the leader in this field. In the video featured above, we see an early prototype being used a by a person with muscular dystrophy. This in itself is rare as most rehabilitation exoskeletons are usually demoed by healthy individuals. The inflatable glove is more comfortable and can be worn longer than most rigid frame counterparts and the inflatable membrane is highly customizable. In a potential future mass production setting, the user’s hand will be scanned, the inflatable membrane will be cast (manufactured) and then wrapped around in an elastic outer layer. The controller, pressure regulators and compressor presumably can be housed in a backpack, waste satchel or even left on a nearby counter.

The “octobot” is a squishy little robot that fits in the palm of your hand and looks like something in a goody bag from a child’s birthday party. But despite its quirky name and diminutive size, this bot represents an astonishing advance in robotics. According to the Harvard researchers who created it, it’s the first soft robot that is completely self-contained. It has no hard electronic components—no batteries or computer chips—and moves without being tethered to a computer. The octobot is basically a pneumatic tube with a very cute exterior. To make it move, hydrogen peroxide—much more concentrated than the kind in your medicine cabinet—is pumped into two reservoirs inside the middle of the octobot’s body. Pressure pushes the liquid through tubes inside the body, where it eventually hits a line of platinum, catalyzing a reaction that produces a gas. From there, the gas expands and moves through a tiny chip known as a microfluidic controller. It alternately directs the gas down one half of the octobot’s tentacles at a time.

You can check step by step in this page how was make it CLICK HERE

This video represents a research study within the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. NIAC is a visionary and far-reaching aerospace program, one that has the potential to create breakthrough technologies for possible future space missions. However, such early stage technology developments may never become actual NASA missions. For more information about NIAC, visit:www.nasa.gov/niac.

OUR PROJECT

  • Design the mold in rhino. The positive, with a frame around that is of a height greater than the reliefs of the design and a base. The base will also have a frame. The interior of this maro will be the same measure as the exterior of the positive frame. This will allow us to assemble the two parts once they are cured.

  • Cut the acrylic with the laser cut. These are the parameters we program to cut the acrylic with the laser cutter

parametres

  • Paste the mold parts with acriflex. Do it with a mask in a ventilated place.
  • Make the silicone mixture. You can look at the volume of the mold you have designed to calculate the amount of material we need in Rhino. Types of silicone We will use dragon skin (more specialized) and ecoflex (we can find it with different amounts of mixture that will vary the shore) Look in the box for the parameters.
  • the time you can work with
  • curing time (can be accelerated with oven)
  • the quantities of each of the components to be put in the mixture (if the mixture is not done well, it will not be cured)

  • Date of Expiry Example in class with ecoflex: 1- Put one of the components in the jar (92g) 2- Put the other component in the jar (92g) 3- Put the jar in the chamber vaccine to extract the bubbles. The pressure pascal must be monitored so that it does not overflow

  • Fill in the molds and leave the time specified in the instructions. If we want to swell the mold on one side, the base has to be wider, we can also achieve it by putting a cloth to make scaffold reinforcing the base, if we want to swell both sides both sides the same width.

siliconeprocess

Methacrylate file for silicone DOWNLOAD

Soft robotics from lucrecia strano on Vimeo.

THE INCREDIBLE POTENTIAL OF FLEXIBLE, SOFT ROBOTS BY GIADA GERBONI