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Pneumatic soft robots are typically fabricated by molding, a manual fabrication process that requires skilled labor. Additive manufacturing has the potential to break this limitation and speed up the fabrication process but struggles with consistently producing high-quality prints. We propose a low-cost approach to improve the print quality of desktop fused deposition modeling by adding a webcam to the printer to monitor the printing process and detect and correct defects such as holes or gaps. We demonstrate that our approach improves the air-tightness of printed pneumatic actuators while reducing the need for fine-tuning printing parameters. Our approach presents a new option for robustly fabricating airtight, soft robotic actuators. 

Existing fluidic soft logic gates for controlling soft robots typically depend on labor-intensive manual fabrication or costly printing methods. In our research, we utilize Fused Deposition Modeling to create fully 3D-printed fluidic logic gates, fabricating a valve from thermoplastic polyurethane. We investigate the 3D printing of tubing and introduce a novel extrusion nozzle for tubing production. Our approach significantly reduces the production time for soft fluidic valves from 27 hours using replica molding to 3 hours with FDM printing. We apply our 3D-printed valve to develop optimized XOR gates and D-latch circuits, presenting a rapid and cost- effective fabrication method for fluidic logic gates that aims to make fluidic circuitry more accessible to the soft robotics community. 

Fluidic control systems target unique applications where conventional electronics fail. However, current fluidic control systems face challenges in accessible fabrication, reproducibility, and modifiable characteristics such as operating pressure and instability count. Herein, fused deposition‐modeled compliant mechanisms with flexing beams and soft linear actuators for fluid switching and the control of soft robotic systems are introduced. A linear actuator switches a compliant mechanism to cut off airflow through off‐the‐shelf tubing. The modular compliant logic devices can be configured as normally open or normally closed switches, as NOT, AND, and OR gates, and as nonvolatile memory elements. Their use is demonstrated in controlling a fluidic stepper motor, a worm‐like robot, and a fluidic display. These fluidic switches are printable using inexpensive desktop 3D printers, can be reliably reproduced in large quantities, and offer a wide range of modifiable parameters, including scalability, adaptability in operating pressure, and the tunability of instability counts for computational and memory functions.