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Award ID contains: 2237506

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  1. ; ; ; ; (, IEEE)
    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. 
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  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, IEEE)
    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. 
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  3. ; (, IEEE)
    Manipulating airflow is important for controlling pneumatically actuated soft robots, however, current switching techniques suffer from leakage under high pressure (>200 kPa) or require a complex fabrication process. We propose a new method for reliably and repeatably cutting off airflow by harnessing pre-loaded torsional forces applied to our tubing. The switching distance and hysteresis of our pre-twisted tubing are programmable by varying the tube length and the twisting angle. Our experiments demonstrate the use of pretwisted tubing to implement CMOS equivalent fluidic switches configured as NOT-, AND-, and OR-gates, and a distance sensor for feedback control for the oscillation of a PneuNet. Our approach of pre-loading tubes with a torsional force allows for simplicity, integrated functionality, and the capability of manipulating high-pressure, fluidic signals mainly at the cost of tubing. 
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