Electronics-Free Logic Circuits for Localized Feedback Control of Multi-Actuator Soft Robots

The vision of creating entirely-soft robots capable of performing complex tasks will be accomplished only when the controllers required for autonomous operation can be fully implemented using soft components. Despite recent advances in compliant fluidic circuitry for mechanical signal processing, the applicability of this technology for soft robot control has been limited by complicated fabrication and tuning processes, and also the need for external signals such as clocks and digital references. We propose a method to develop pneumatic soft robots in which coordinated interactions between multiple actuators are performed using controllers implemented on components distributively embedded in the soft structures of the system. In this approach, the notions of binary and multi-valued actuator logic states are introduced. In this way, the physical local dynamical couplings between the analog states of the actuators, established using soft valves of a new type, can be thought of as logic-gate-based mappings acting on discretized representations of the actuator states. Consequently, techniques for digital logic design can be applied to derive the architectures of the localized mechanical couplings that intelligently coordinate the oscillation patterns of the actuator responses. For the purposes of controller tuning, the soft valves are conceived so that their main physical parameters can be adjusted from the exterior of the robot through simple geometrical changes of the corresponding structural elements. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we present the development of a six-state locomoting soft robot.