Soft Robot Hand Is First to Be Fully 3-D-Printed in a Single Step

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 03:45:00 GMT
Scientific American - Technology

Then it played Super Mario Bros

A soft robotic hand has finally achieved a historic accomplishment: beating the first level of Super Mario Bros.

Printing It Up. But in making soft robots more sophisticated, fluidic circuits also render the machines harder to manufacture and assemble.

"Never once has it been done all in a single run," he says, "To have an entire soft robot with all of the integrated fluidic circuitry and the body features and the soft actuators all printed."

The model they employed, manufactured by a company called StrataSys, could produce three types of material: a soft rubberlike substance, a more rigid plasticlike one and a water-soluble "Sacrificial material" that acts as scaffolding during printing but must be removed from the final product afterward.

Such high-tech printers can retail for tens of thousands of dollars-but Sochol's team did not need to buy one.

"So we sent our files to them, they printed it, and then we picked it up." Sochol estimates that anyone else wanting to print one of these designs-which his team shared as open-access software on the development site GitHub-could use a similar 3-D-printing service for about $100 or less.

"But there is cumbersome nature to having to create the circuit by one method and then insert it, like we did, into a molded and 3-D-printed robot. And I would say that the method that chose ... has many advantages in terms of being able to print multiple materials of different stiffness." Lewis also points out that the new soft bot is not ready to go immediately after printing.

"After cleaning up their printed robots, Sochol's team had to design a performance test. Earlier studies have programmed robotic fingers to play a tune on a piano, for example, but Sochol's team thought that task was too easy."With that, we could set the tempo arbitrarily, he says.

For decades, the team knew exactly what sequence of buttons the hand would need to press to win the game's first level.

Winning the video game showed that the fully printed robotic hand could respond swiftly and accurately to a changing input.

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