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Abstract Soft robots adapt passively to complex environments due to their inherent compliance, allowing them to interact safely with fragile or irregular objects and traverse uneven terrain. The vast tunability and ubiquity of textiles has enabled new soft robotic capabilities, especially in the field of wearable robots, but existing textile processing techniques (e.g., cut‐and‐sew, thermal bonding) are limited in terms of rapid, additive, accessible, and waste‐free manufacturing. While 3D knitting has the potential to address these limitations, an incomplete understanding of the impact of structure and material on knit‐scale mechanical properties and macro‐scale device performance has precluded the widespread adoption of knitted robots. In this work, the roles of knit structure and yarn material properties on textile mechanics spanning three regimes–unfolding, geometric rearrangement, and yarn stretching–are elucidated and shown to be tailorable across unique knit architectures and yarn materials. Based on this understanding, 3D knit soft actuators for extension, contraction, and bending are constructed. Combining these actuation primitives enables the monolithic fabrication of entire soft grippers and robots in a single‐step additive manufacturing procedure suitable for a variety of applications. This approach represents a first step in seamlessly “printing” conformal, low‐cost, customizable textile‐based soft robots on‐demand.
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Geometrical Analysis of Simple Contours Deposited by a 3D Printing Hexacopter
Current limitations in vertical and horizontal mobility for ground robots in 3D printing of medium to large-scale objects have recently led to the development of a 3D printing hexacopter testbed at the University of Texas at Austin. This testbed can fly to a desired location and deposit polylac- tic acid on flat surfaces. A previous study has shown the feasibility of this approach but has not yet quantified the testbed’s printing capabilities. In this paper, we quantify the printing capabil- ities. We print square contours of different sizes and quantify the printed results based on their geometric dimensions. We also quantify the testbed’s trajectory tracking to assess the testbed’s positioning accuracy during printing. In quantifying the testbed, we lay the groundwork for using aerial robots in printing applications of medium to large-scale objects, such as concrete printing.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1646522
- PAR ID:
- 10383397
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 International Solid Freeform Fabrication Symposium
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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