Joe Seonggun, Bliah Ouriel, Magdassi Shlomo, Beccai Lucia
Soft BioRobotics Perception, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genova, 16163, Italy.
Casali Center for Applied Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry, Center for Nanotechnology and Nanoscience Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 9190401, Israel.
Adv Sci (Weinh). 2023 Aug;10(23):e2302080. doi: 10.1002/advs.202302080. Epub 2023 Jun 15.
Although natural continuum structures, such as the boneless elephant trunk, provide inspiration for new versatile grippers, highly deformable, jointless, and multidimensional actuation has still not been achieved. The challenging pivotal requisites are to avoid sudden changes in stiffness, combined with the capability of providing reliable large deformations in different directions. This research addresses these two challenges by harnessing porosity at two levels: material and design. Based on the extraordinary extensibility and compressibility of volumetrically tessellated structures with microporous elastic polymer walls, monolithic soft actuators are fabricated by 3D printing unique polymerizable emulsions. The resulting monolithic pneumatic actuators are printed in a single process and are capable of bidirectional movements with just one actuation source. The proposed approach is demonstrated by two proof-of-concepts: a three-fingered gripper, and the first ever soft continuum actuator that encodes biaxial motion and bidirectional bending. The results open up new design paradigms for continuum soft robots with bioinspired behavior based on reliable and robust multidimensional motions.
尽管诸如无骨象鼻等天然连续体结构为新型多功能夹具提供了灵感，但高度可变形、无关节和多维驱动仍未实现。具有挑战性的关键要求是避免刚度的突然变化，同时具备在不同方向提供可靠大变形的能力。本研究通过在材料和设计两个层面利用孔隙率来应对这两个挑战。基于具有微孔弹性聚合物壁的体积镶嵌结构的非凡可扩展性和可压缩性，通过3D打印独特的可聚合乳液来制造整体式软致动器。由此产生的整体式气动致动器在单一过程中打印而成，仅需一个驱动源就能实现双向运动。通过两个概念验证展示了所提出的方法：一个三指夹具，以及首个对双轴运动和双向弯曲进行编码的软连续体致动器。这些结果为基于可靠且强大的多维运动、具有仿生行为的连续体软机器人开辟了新的设计范例。
