Soft Manipulator
About
The Sorotoki
toolkit provides a soft robotic manipulator that features three independent bellow networks and a three-fingered soft robotic gripper attached to the end effector (see above). With independent actuation of each bellow network, the manipulator has a full 3D workspace of approximately 150
Fabrication details
The soft manipulator is fully printable. Below, we provided a list of the printer materials.
- 1
: Soft Bellow - Elastic 80A - Formlabs (recommended) - 3
: Soft Finger - Elastic 80A - Formlabs (recommended) - 1
: Connector One-way - Rigid 10k - Formlabs (optional) - 1
: Connector Three-way - Rigid 10k - Formlabs (optional) - 1
: Base mount M6 - Prusament PLA Azure - Prusa (optional)
Printing of Elastic 80A
When printing Elastic 80A, the recommended supports for the material are very thick -- thus difficult to remove. We recommend generating the supports using Rigid 10K, then change the material to Elastic 80A. Support can then be easily removed manually (no pliers required).
Cleaning and closing of Soft Actuators
A crucial step is cleaning of the elastic resin parts. If residual resin is not properly removed/cleaned, it will greatly affect the quality and performance of the soft actuator. We recommend following the cleaning procedures proposed in Proper et al. 1, see Git documentation. The paper draft can be found here: Paper.pdf. In their approach, a perastaltic pump is used to pump cleaning fluid through the soft actuator prior to curing. To allow fluid to flow, both sides of the soft actuator are open! They must be closed using 3 mm plug printed from the same material! The plug can be glued in place using uncured resin, and then placed in an UV chamber for a short duration.
Connecting Soft Actuator to Rigid Connector
Similar to closing of the soft actuators, uncured resin can be used to make a robust connection to the rigid pressure connector. This greatly improves air-tightness of the complete system.
Downloadable content
Complete Soft Robot Manipulator - 14.6 MB uncompressed (.zip)
Soft Bellow (STL) Soft Finger (STL) Connector One-way (STL)
Connector Three-way (STL) Base mount M6 (STL)
3D Visualization
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Proper. B, Caasenbrood, B., & I. Kuling (2023). Easy Cleaning of 3D SLA/DLP Printed Soft Fluidic Actuators with Complex Internal Geometry. 6th IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics, RoboSoft 2023. (submitted). https://github.com/ReshapeTUe/Peristaltic-Pump-Documentation ↩