Instant soft robot: A simple recipe for quick and easy manufacturing

Soft robots offer interesting features and can be manufactured cheaply using widely available lab equipment. However, with increasing robot complexity, the manufacturing process often becomes expensive, requires sophisticated or experimental tools, highly skilled technicians and time. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach for the fabrication of soft pneumatic fiber-reinforced actuators. With the new design, a scaffolding to reinforce the actuator is printed inside a single-use mold. The mold is injected with silicone and broken apart, while the reinforcement detaches from the mold and remains within the actuator. Using flexible filaments such as nylon allows for the resulting actuators to be not only compliant but also squeezable. Our approach reduces the needed work effort and requires virtually no manufacturing skills when compared to current labor-intensive fabrication techniques. It also does not require any equipment other than an affordable, single nozzle desktop 3D printer. In the paper, we presented the design and fabrication process of different types of modules: linearly extending, bending and a manipulation module. We have compared the new instant design and the previous fiber-reinforced design in terms of bending, elongation and generated forces.