12. Soft robotics¶
I have been interested in the idea of folding textiles and origami for quite some time. I have wanted to explore using robotics to create soft folding textiles so this week was really exciting for me. I had the idea to create a 3D printed overlay that would provide some rigidity or structure to a soft textile to help it fold.
Silicone Gripper Actuator¶
For this first actuator I created a two part mold in Rhino. I did not have permission to access the CNC equipment in my makerspace yet so I ended up 3D printing it at home. For a small mold like this the 3D printing worked great. The mold was printed with a .2mm layer resolution in regular PLA. I coated the mold in a mold release and the ecoflex silicone came right out.
To assemble the actuator I filled the molds with ecoflex silicone. Once the silicone cured according to instructions on the package I de-molded the piece containing the air chambers and placed it on top of the smooth piece of silicone. I “glued” the two layers together with more liquid silicone. Once that cure I inserted a small piece of silicone tube in and “glued” it on with more liquid silicone. Once that was all cured I tested by inflating with a manual air pump. It lasted a few test runs but then the interior layers separated and became one big balloon. In the future I would redesign the interior chambers to allow more surface area between the different chambers so this hopefully will not happen.
Experiments with Textile Movement¶
I wanted to take the idea of the fused vinyl actuators we learned about this week and see if I could combine them with fabric manipulation techniques. I was hoping to make robotic gathers and ruffles that couple be pneumatically controlled. I tried a few shapes and they didn’t move how I expected but I definitely learned a lot from them. After all of this I decided this was an area I wanted to pursue further research on for my final project.
Soft Folding Robot¶
I decided to experiment with combining 3D printed geometric patterns over the soft pneumatic shapes to try and control the folding a little more. This worked out better than I expected and I am happy with how these turned out. The combination of the rigid 3D printed pieces in the overlay really controls how the pieces fold. It really helped the piece shrink as it was inflated and created crisp fold lines. I’m looking forward to trying this with different shapes and sizes.
Files¶
- Silicone Gripper Base .stl
- Twist Robot Outer .svg
- Ruffle Robot Inner .svg
- Ruffle Robot Outer .svg
- Jumble Robot Inner .svg
- Jumble Robot Outer .svg
- Shrinking/Folding Robot Outer .svg
- Shrinking/Folding Robot Overlay .stl
- Shrinking/Folding Robot Overlay .3dm
References¶
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/super-strong-robot-muscles-inspired-by-origami/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/mits-programmable-shape-changing-material-goes-far-beyond-origami/ https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2006211117 https://designbreakonline.com/tag/origami/ https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/soro.2016.0023 https://www.softrobotics.io/getflowio https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0825/9/1/3/htm https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924424719320163