Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new method that doesn't require any special equipment and works in just minutes to create soft, flexible, 3D-prnted robots.
The innovation comes from rethinking the way soft robots are built: instead of figuring out how to add soft materials to a rigid robot body, the UC San Diego researcher started with a soft body and added rigid features to key components. The strictures were inspired by insect exoskeletons, which have both soft and rigid parts — the researchers called their creations
“flexoskeletons (柔性外骨骼）”.The new method allows for the construction of soft components for robots in a small bit of the time previously needed and for a small bit of the cost.
“We hope that these flexoskeletons will lead to the creation of a new class of soft robots, ” said Nick Gravish, a mechanical engineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the UC San Diego and the paper's senior author. “We want to make soft robots easier to build for researchers all over the world.”
The new method makes it possible to build large groups of flexoskeleton robots with little hand assembly (装配）as well as assemble a library of Lego-like components so that robot parts can be easily swapped.
Researchers detail their work in the April 7 issue of the journal Soft Robotics. The team plans to make their designs available to researchers at other institutions as well as high schools.
One flexoskeleton component takes 10 minutes to print and costs less than $1. Flexokeleton printing can be done on most low-cost commercially available printers. Printing and assembling a whole robot takes under two hours.
The final goal is to create an assembly line that prints whole flexoskeleton robots without any need for hand assembly. These small robots could do as much work as one massive robot on its own — or more.
