LiftTiles: Constructive Building Blocks for Prototyping Room-scale Shape-changing Interfaces

Large-scale shape-changing interfaces have great potential, but creating such systems requires substantial time, cost, space, and efforts, which hinders the research community to explore interactions beyond the scale of human hands. We introduce modular inflatable actuators as building blocks for prototyping room-scale shape-changing interfaces. Each actuator can change its height from 15cm to 150cm, actuated and controlled by air pressure. Each unit is low-cost (8 USD), lightweight (10 kg), compact (15 cm), and robust, making it well-suited for prototyping room-scale shape transformations. Moreover, our modular and reconfigurable design allows researchers and designers to quickly construct different geometries and to explore various applications. This paper contributes to the design and implementation of highly extendable inflatable actuators, and demonstrates a range of scenarios that can leverage this modular building block.Comment: TEI 202

Fluid‐driven soft CoboSkin for safer human–robot collaboration: fabrication and adaptation

In human–robot collaboration, the wrapping material on robots is not only required to have the sensing ability to adapt to the external environment but also need to have the function of cushioning the collision between human and robot. Herein, a fluid‐driven soft robot skin with sensing and actuating function is successfully applied to a collaborative robot and working well with the host robot. The skin is an integration of sponge force sensors and pneumatic actuators. By altering the internal air pressure in pneumatic actuators, the developed robot skin can provide more than ten times tunable stiffness and sensitivity. In addition, the skin can reduce the peak force of the collision and achieve the actuating function. Using three‐dimensional printing and computer‐aided design, the skin is fabricated and attached to a collaborative robot conformally. Drawing upon the data acquisition and control system, the experiment for illustrating the applications of the CoboSkin is successfully performed. The skin provides the robot with multi‐functions, which are similar to the human muscle and skin attached to human bones. By mimicking human skin and muscle with tactile sensing function and stiffness tuning function, CoboSkin can enhance the adaptability of the robot to human daily life

DEVELOPMENT OF A SOFT PNEUMATIC ACTUATOR FOR MODULAR ROBOTIC MECHANISMS

Soft robotics is a widely and rapidly growing field of research today. Soft pneumatic actuators, as a fundamental element in soft robotics, have gained huge popularity and are being employed for the development of soft robots. During the last decade, a variety of hyper-elastic robotic systems have been realized. As the name suggests, such robots are made up of soft materials, and do not have any underlying rigid mechanical structure. These robots are actuated employing various methods like pneumatic, electroactive, jamming etc. Generally, in order to achieve a desired mechanical response to produce required actuation or manipulation, two or more materials having different stiffness are utilized to develop a soft robot. However, this method introduces complications in the fabrication process as well as in further design flexibility and modifications. The current work presents a design scheme of a soft robotic actuator adapting an easier fabrication approach, which is economical and environment friendly as well. The purpose is the realization of a soft pneumatic actuator having functional ability to produce effective actuation, and which is further employable to develop modular and scalable mechanisms. That infers to scrutinize the profile and orientation of the internal actuation cavity and the outer shape of viii the actuator. Utilization of a single material for this actuator has been considered to make this design scheme convenient. A commercial silicone rubber was selected which served for an economical process both in terms of the cost as well as its accommodating fabrication process through molding. In order to obtain the material behavior, \u2018Ansys Workbench 17.1 R \u2019 has been used. Cubic outline for the actuator aided towards the realization of a body shape which can easily be engaged for the development of modular mechanisms employing multiple units. This outer body shape further facilitates to achieve the stability and portability of the actuator. The soft actuator has been named \u2018Soft Cubic Module\u2019 based on its external cubic shape. For the internal actuation cavity design, various shapes, such as spherical, elliptical and cylindrical, were examined considering their different sizes and orientations within the cubic module. These internal cavities were simulated in order to achieve single degree of freedom actuation. That means, only one face of the cube is principally required to produce effective deformation. \u2018Creo Perametric 3.0 M 130\u2019 has been used to design the model and to evaluate the performance of actuation cavities in terms of effective deformation and the resulting von-mises stress. Out of the simulated profiles, cylindrical cavity with desired outcomes has been further considered to design the soft actuator. \u2018Ansys Workbench 17.1 R \u2019 environment was further used to assess the performance of cylindrical actuation cavity. Evaluation in two different simulation environments helped to validate the initially achieved results. The developed soft cubic actuator was then employed to develop different mechanisms in a single unit configuration as well as multi-unit robotic system developments. This design scheme is considered as the first tool to investigate its capacity to perform certain given tasks in various configurations. Alongside its application as a single unit gripper and a two unit bio-mimetic crawling mechanism, this soft actuator has been employed to realize a four degree ix of freedom robotic mechanism. The formation of this primitive soft robotic four axis mechanism is being further considered to develop an equivalent mechanism similar to the well known Stewart platform, with advantages of compactness, simpler kinematics design, easier control, and lesser cost. Overall, the accomplished results indicate that the design scheme of Soft Cubic Module is helpful in realizing a simple and cost-effective soft pneumatic actuator which is modular and scalable. Another favourable point of this scheme is the use of a single material with convenient fabrication and handling

Development of a Fabrication Technique for Soft Planar Inflatable Composites

Soft robotics is a rapidly growing field in robotics that combines aspects of biologically inspired characteristics to unorthodox methods capable of conforming and/or adapting to unknown tasks or environments that would otherwise be improbable or complex with conventional robotic technologies. The field of soft robotics has grown rapidly over the past decade with increasing popularity and relevance to real-world applications. However, the means of fabricating these soft, compliant and intricate robots still poses a fundamental challenge, due to the liberal use of soft materials that are difficult to manipulate in their original state such as elastomers and fabric. These material properties rely on informal design approaches and bespoke fabrication methods to build soft systems. As such, there are a limited variety of fabrication techniques used to develop soft robots which hinders the scalability of robots and the time to manufacture, thus limiting their development. This research focuses towards developing a novel fabrication method for constructing soft planar inflatable composites. The fundamental method is based on a sub-set of additive manufacturing known as composite layering. The approach is designed from a planar manner and takes layers of elastomeric materials, embedded strain-limiting and mask layers. These components are then built up through a layer-by-layer fabrication method with the use of a bespoke film applicator set-up. This enables the fabrication of millimetre-scale soft inflatable composites with complex integrated masks and/or strain-limiting layers. These inflatable composites can then be cut into a desired shape via laser cutting or ablation. A design approach was also developed to expand the functionality of these inflatable composites through modelling and simulation via finite element analysis. Proof of concept prototypes were designed and fabricated to enable pneumatic driven actuation in the form of bending soft actuators, adjustable stiffness sensor, and planar shape change. This technique highlights the feasibility of the fabrication method and the value of its use in creating multi-material composite soft actuators which are thin, compact, flexible, and stretchable and can be applicable towards real-world application

A Review on Vacuum-Powered Fluidic Actuators in Soft Robotics

In the past few years, vacuum-powered soft actuators have shown strong potential due to their promising mechanical performance (i.e., fail-safe, fast response, compactness, robustness, jamming, etc.). Indeed, they have been widely exploited in soft robots, for example, grippers and manipulators, wearable devices, locomotion robots, etc. In contrast to inflatable fluidic actuators, the properties of the materials with which they are built have a stronger influence on the kinematic trajectory. For this reason, understanding, both, the geometry and morphology of the core structure, and the material characteristics, is crucial to achieving the desired kinetics and kinematics. In this work, an overview of vacuum-powered soft fluidic actuators is provided, by classifying them as based on morphological design, origami architecture, and structural instability. A variety of constitutive materials and design principles are described and discussed. Strategies for designing vacuum-powered actuators are outlined from a mechanical perspective. Then the main materials and fabrication processes are described, and the most promising approaches are highlighted. Finally, the open challenges for enabling highly deformable and strong soft vacuum-powered actuation are discussed

Capability by Stacking: The Current Design Heuristic for Soft Robots

Soft robots are a new class of systems being developed and studied by robotics scientists. These systems have a diverse range of applications including sub-sea manipulation and rehabilitative robotics. In their current state of development, the prevalent paradigm for the control architecture in these systems is a one-to-one mapping of controller outputs to actuators. In this work, we define functional blocks as the physical implementation of some discrete behaviors, which are presented as a decomposition of the behavior of the soft robot. We also use the term ‘stacking’ as the ability to combine functional blocks to create a system that is more complex and has greater capability than the sum of its parts. By stacking functional blocks a system designer can increase the range of behaviors and the overall capability of the system. As the community continues to increase the capabilities of soft systems—by stacking more and more functional blocks—we will encounter a practical limit with the number of parallelized control lines. In this paper, we review 20 soft systems reported in the literature and we observe this trend of one-to-one mapping of control outputs to functional blocks. We also observe that stacking functional blocks results in systems that are increasingly capable of a diverse range of complex motions and behaviors, leading ultimately to systems that are capable of performing useful tasks. The design heuristic that we observe is one of increased capability by stacking simple units—a classic engineering approach. As we move towards more capability in soft robotic systems, and begin to reach practical limits in control, we predict that we will require increased amounts of autonomy in the system. The field of soft robotics is in its infancy, and as we move towards realizing the potential of this technology, we will need to develop design tools and control paradigms that allow us to handle the complexity in these stacked, non-linear systems

Modular soft pneumatic actuator system design for compliance matching

The future of robotics is personal. Never before has technology been as pervasive as it is today, with advanced mobile electronics hardware and multi-level network connectivity pushing âsmartâ devices deeper into our daily lives through home automation systems, virtual assistants, and wearable activity monitoring. As the suite of personal technology around us continues to grow in this way, augmenting and offloading the burden of routine activities of daily living, the notion that this trend will extend to robotics seems inevitable. Transitioning robots from their current principal domain of industrial factory settings to domestic, workplace, or public environments is not simply a matter of relocation or reprogramming, however. The key differences between âtraditionalâ types of robots and those which would best serve personal, proximal, human interactive applications demand a new approach to their design. Chief among these are requirements for safety, adaptability, reliability, reconfigurability, and to a more practical extent, usability. These properties frame the context and objectives of my thesis work, which seeks to provide solutions and answers to not only how these features might be achieved in personal robotic systems, but as well what benefits they can afford. I approach the investigation of these questions from a perspective of compliance matching of hardware systems to their applications, by providing methods to achieve mechanical attributes complimentary to their environment and end-use. These features are fundamental to the burgeoning field of Soft Robotics, wherein flexible, compliant materials are used as the basis for the structure, actuation, sensing, and control of complete robotic systems. Combined with pressurized air as a power source, soft pneumatic actuator (SPA) based systems offers new and novel methods of exploiting the intrinsic compliance of soft material components in robotic systems. While this strategy seems to answer many of the needs for human-safe robotic applications, it also brings new questions and challenges: What are the needs and applications personal robots may best serve? Are soft pneumatic actuators capable of these tasks, or âusefulâ work output and performance? How can SPA based systems be applied to provide complex functionality needed for operation in diverse, real-world environments? What are the theoretical and practical challenges in implementing scalable, multiple degrees of freedom systems, and how can they be overcome? I present solutions to these problems in my thesis work, elucidated through scientific design, testing and evaluation of robotic prototypes which leverage and demonstrate three key features: 1) Intrinsic compliance: provided by passive elastic and flexible component material properties, 2) Extrinsic compliance: rendered through high number of independent, controllable degrees of freedom, and 3) Complementary design: exhibited by modular, plug and play architectures which combine both attributes to achieve compliant systems. Through these core projects and others listed below I have been engaged in soft robotic technology, its application, and solutions to the challenges which are critical to providing a path forward within the soft robotics field, as well as for the future of personal robotics as a whole toward creating a better society

2020 NASA Technology Taxonomy

This document is an update (new photos used) of the PDF version of the 2020 NASA Technology Taxonomy that will be available to download on the OCT Public Website. The updated 2020 NASA Technology Taxonomy, or "technology dictionary", uses a technology discipline based approach that realigns like-technologies independent of their application within the NASA mission portfolio. This tool is meant to serve as a common technology discipline-based communication tool across the agency and with its partners in other government agencies, academia, industry, and across the world

AI-based soft module for safe human–robot interaction towards 4D printing

Soft robotic modules have potential use for therapeutic and educational purposes. To do so, they need to be safe, soft, smart, and customizable to serve individuals’ different preferences and personalities. A safe modular robotic product made of soft materials, particularly silicon, programmed by artificial intelligence algorithms and developed via additive manufacturing would be promising. This study focuses on the safe tactile interaction between humans and robots by means of soft material characteristics for translating physical communication to auditory. The embedded vibratory sensors used to stimulate touch senses transmitted through soft materials are presented. The soft module was developed and verified successfully to react to three different patterns of human–robot contact, particularly users’ touches, and then communicate the type of contact with sound. The study develops and verifies a model that can classify different tactile gestures via machine learning algorithms for safe human–robot physical interaction. The system accurately recognizes the gestures and shapes of three-dimensional (3D) printed soft modules. The gestures used for the experiment are the three most common, including slapping, squeezing, and tickling. The model builds on the concept of how safe human–robot physical interactions could help with cognitive and behavioral communication. In this context, the ability to measure, classify, and reflect the behavior of soft materials in robotic modules represents a prerequisite for endowing robotic materials in additive manufacturing for safe interaction with humans

Control-based 4D printing: adaptive 4D-printed systems

Building on the recent progress of four-dimensional (4D) printing to produce dynamic structures, this study aimed to bring this technology to the next level by introducing control-based 4D printing to develop adaptive 4D-printed systems with highly versatile multi-disciplinary applications, including medicine, in the form of assisted soft robots, smart textiles as wearable electronics and other industries such as agriculture and microfluidics. This study introduced and analysed adaptive 4D-printed systems with an advanced manufacturing approach for developing stimuli-responsive constructs that organically adapted to environmental dynamic situations and uncertainties as nature does. The adaptive 4D-printed systems incorporated synergic integration of three-dimensional (3D)-printed sensors into 4D-printing and control units, which could be assembled and programmed to transform their shapes based on the assigned tasks and environmental stimuli. This paper demonstrates the adaptivity of these systems via a combination of proprioceptive sensory feedback, modeling and controllers, as well as the challenges and future opportunities they present