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A Seamless Workflow for Design and Fabrication of Multimaterial Pneumatic Soft Actuators. Accepted to IEEE CASE 2021

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This research earned the IEEE-CASE Best Application Paper Award at the 2021 CASE Conference in Lyon, France!

Highlights

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  • A novel software workflow for exploration of the complex design space of pneumatic soft actuators

  • Prioritization of seamless connectivity between design and evaluation phases: geometry and material specification, visualization, simulation, and fabrication 

  • A graphical user interface for interactive exploration of computational network representations of implicit geometry functions

  • Automated generation of simulation input files for one-click execution of nonlinear FEA evaluation of candidate designs

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A Seamless Workflow

  • Multimaterial soft actuators at progressive stages of development in our workflow. From left: signed distance function geometry description; surface triangulation and material assignment; simulated deformation during actuation; preparation for additive manufacturing; 3D-printed actuator.

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An Interactive Design Tool

  • Our GUI-based, interactive design tool lowers barriers to multimaterial soft actuator design

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  • Automatic generation of FEA studies using shell and volumetric elements. Shell element offer drastically reduced computation cost at the expense of lower resolution and accuracy.

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Fabricated Actuators

  • Actuators designed in our workflow can be fabricated by additive manufacturing and actuated using pressurized fluid.

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