Pneumatic Networks for Soft Robotics that Actuate Rapidly

By Bobak Mosadegh, Panagiotis Polygerinos, Christoph Keplinger, Sophia W Wennstedt, Robert F. Shepherd, U. Gupta, Jongmin Shim, Katia Bertoldi, Conor James Walsh, George M. Whitesides. 2014

1,496 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soft robots actuated by inflation of a pneumatic network (a “pneu‐net”) of small channels in elastomeric materials are appealing for producing sophisticated motions with simple controls. Although current designs of pneu‐nets achieve motion with large amplitudes, they do so relatively slowly (over seconds). This paper describes a new design for pneu‐nets that reduces the amount of gas needed for inflation of the pneu‐net, and thus increases its speed of actuation. A simple actuator can bend from a linear to a quasi‐circular shape in 50 ms when pressurized at ΔP = 345 kPa. At high rates of pressurization, the path along which the actuator bends depends on this rate. When inflated fully, the chambers of this new design experience only one‐tenth the change in volume of that required for the previous design. This small change in volume requires comparably low levels of strain in the material at maximum amplitudes of actuation, and commensurately low rates of fatigue and failure. This actuator can operate over a million cycles without significant degradation of performance. This design for soft robotic actuators combines high rates of actuation with high reliability of the actuator, and opens new areas of application for them.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca6a38c10b96d2759155731b1797c09d8ed083f6

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In Biomedical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

A soft, bistable valve for autonomous control of soft actuators (2018, background): “The gripper consists of five fast pneu-net bending actuators (38) arranged circularly around a soft valve, with a contact sensor integrated in the palm of the gripper (Fig.”
A Resilient, Untethered Soft Robot (2014, neutral): “…body so that the robot could operate at higher pneumatic pressures; (ii) designed a larger body size to accommodate and support the power source; (iii) employed a modiﬁed Pneu-Net (PN) architecture 14 to allow more rapid and stable actuation than our previous Pneu-Net design; and (iv)…”
Soft Robots Manufacturing: A Review (2018, background): “The reinforcements can also be molded in the initial molding operations (Mosadegh et al., 2014) or even overmolded (Polygerinos et al.”
Interaction Forces of Soft Fiber Reinforced Bending Actuators (2017, background): “previous work on soft-bending actuators made from the same soft material [34].”