Mimicking: Soft Robots

Designing a soft robot to move organically -- to bend like a finger or twist like a wrist -- has always been a process of trial and error. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed a method to automatically design soft actuators based on the desired movements.

Harvard researchers developed a model to design a soft robot that bends like an index finger and twists like a thumb when powered by a single pressure source.

The creation of these soft robots look like an easy thing to achieve but, in actuality, it is a very complex creation. "The design is so complicated because one actuator type is not enough to produce complex motions," said Fionnuala Connolly, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the paper. "You need a sequence of actuator segments, each performing a different motion and you want to actuate them using a single input." 

The method developed by the team uses mathematical modeling of fluid-powered, fiber-reinforced actuators to optimize the design of an actuator to perform a certain motion. The team used this model to design a soft robot that bends like an index finger and twists like a thumb when powered by a single pressure source.

This picture demonstrates all that they have built through the soft robots which mimics what the persons hands do. As you can see as the person closes their hand so does the soft robot. 

The new methodology will be included in the Soft Robotic Toolkit, an online, open-source resource developed at SEAS to assist researchers, educators and budding innovators to design, fabrication, model, characterize and control their own soft robots.