Soft Pneumatic Actuators with Replaceable Kirigami Skins for Various Motions

Existing soft actuators typically exhibit a single deformation mode and rely on mold redesign to achieve diverse motions, resulting in limited task adaptability and elevated fabrication costs. To address these issues, this study proposes a pneumatic actuator with a replaceable constraint layer. This actuator employs a silicone chamber and a fabric layer with kirigami patterns as the constraint layer. Different kirigami patterns are formed by specific arrangements of kirigami units. After laser-cutting these patterns onto the bonded sleeve-shaped fabric, various constraint layers are constructed to enable the actuators to perform not only fundamental motions like elongation and bending but also combined motions in the same chamber. Moreover, the sleeve-shaped kirigami skin enables rapid replacement of the constraint layer. Finally, two types of soft robots are constructed using pneumatic actuators with kirigami skins to achieve object gripping and exploration in confined spaces. This work enables various motions of the actuator by using the same chamber and replaceable skins, paving the way for low-cost soft actuator design.