8. Soft robotics¶

Research¶

https://cdfg.mit.edu/assets/files/aero-morph.pdf

Inspiration¶

Ideation¶

The accessibility of creating soft robots with just vinyl sheets, butter paper and a clothes iron was amazing. I had so many thoughts. I wanted to approach this from multiple directions - biomimicry in motion, the mechanics and animatronics translating to soft robotics, origami actuations, texture play, and more.

I was inspired by the various grippers I had seen, but wanted to make something more than just a gripper. I decided a climber-crawler bot inspired by a mix of the Inchworm motion as well as tree climbing monkeys and humans.

Vinyl Trials¶

I started off with a lot of vinyl trials to understand how the different parameters would affect the angle of bending and resultant motion or geometric position. I wanted to test the effect of th diamond's aspect ratio, distances between consecutive diamonds, the orientation as well as the change in orientation of the diamonds, as well as other shapes like narrow slits, circular vesics, etc.

After this, I had planned on exploring different motions, formations and actuated structures.

However, our supplier sent me sticker vinyl and not heat transfer vinyl, so I ended up spending several days trying to figure what went wrong as well as doing trials on a whole range of butterpapers since I first suspected those to be wrong. I will continue with vinyl trials once the right vinyl arrives.

TPU¶

Since vinyl wasn't working, and I had a TPU sheet that Anastasia gave me during Fab25, I decided to try laser welding the sheet. This was a successful operation, the weld was good, the defocussed beam worked exactly as predicted, and the cutting was fine as well. However, the sheet was so thick that inflation wasn't easy and the stiffness proved resistant. I created a smaple to test the technique but abandoned the process since it would not work as well as vinyl.

Household PE¶

Since neither of these processes were giving satisfactory results, I tried to work with milk bags and other household polyethylene material that was typically heat-sealed to package food and other materials.

/wip/ /add pics/

EcoPlex Gripper and Crawler¶

While I wanted to test the idea on Vinyl before I moved to ecoplex and casting, I decided to go ahead anyway. I modelled the mold based on the gripper's features, making the fins slightly larger.