3D printing of robotic soft actuators with programmable bioinspired architectures
By M. Schaffner, Jakob A. Faber, Lucas Pianegonda, P. Rühs, F. Coulter, André R. Studart. Nature Communications, 2018
451 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Soft actuation allows robots to interact safely with humans, other machines, and their surroundings. Full exploitation of the potential of soft actuators has, however, been hindered by the lack of simple manufacturing routes to generate multimaterial parts with intricate shapes and architectures. Here, we report a 3D printing platform for the seamless digital fabrication of pneumatic silicone actuators exhibiting programmable bioinspired architectures and motions. The actuators comprise an elastomeric body whose surface is decorated with reinforcing stripes at a well-defined lead angle. Similar to the fibrous architectures found in muscular hydrostats, the lead angle can be altered to achieve elongation, contraction, or twisting motions. Using a quantitative model based on lamination theory, we establish design principles for the digital fabrication of silicone-based soft actuators whose functional response is programmed within the material's properties and architecture. Exploring such programmability enables 3D printing of a broad range of soft morphing structures. 3D-printed soft actuators have limited motion and are far from reaching the level of complexity found in biological systems. Here the authors present a multimaterial 3D printing platform for the fabrication of soft actuators displaying a wide range of motions that are programmable.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c3eaea88cfe5cb28fa8d79b7057d817a108479f
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Mechanical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- A Review of Stereolithography: Processes and Systems (2020, background): “AM technologies have been combined with diverse areas including electronics [3,4], actuators [5,6], biomedical engineering [7] and sensors [8].”