Fully 3D-printed soft robots with integrated fluidic circuitry

Joshua D Hubbard; Ruben Acevedo; Kristen M Edwards; Abdullah T Alsharhan; Ziteng Wen; Jennifer Landry; Kejin Wang; Saul Schaffer; Ryan D Sochol

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abe5257

Fully 3D-printed soft robots with integrated fluidic circuitry

Sci Adv. 2021 Jul 14;7(29):eabe5257. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe5257. Print 2021 Jul.

Authors

Joshua D Hubbard^{1

2

3}, Ruben Acevedo^{2

3}, Kristen M Edwards^{2

3

4}, Abdullah T Alsharhan², Ziteng Wen^{2

3}, Jennifer Landry^{2

3}, Kejin Wang², Saul Schaffer^{2

3

5}, Ryan D Sochol^{6

3

7

8}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
³ Maryland Robotics Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
⁵ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
⁶ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. rsochol@umd.edu.
⁷ Department of Bioengineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
⁸ Robert E. Fischell Institute of Biomedical Devices, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.

Abstract

The emergence of soft robots has presented new challenges associated with controlling the underlying fluidics of such systems. Here, we introduce a strategy for additively manufacturing unified soft robots comprising fully integrated fluidic circuitry in a single print run via PolyJet three-dimensional (3D) printing. We explore the efficacy of this approach for soft robots designed to leverage novel 3D fluidic circuit elements-e.g., fluidic diodes, "normally closed" transistors, and "normally open" transistors with geometrically tunable pressure-gain functionalities-to operate in response to fluidic analogs of conventional electronic signals, including constant-flow ["direct current (DC)"], "alternating current (AC)"-inspired, and preprogrammed aperiodic ("variable current") input conditions. By enabling fully integrated soft robotic entities (composed of soft actuators, fluidic circuitry, and body features) to be rapidly disseminated, modified on demand, and 3D-printed in a single run, the presented design and additive manufacturing strategy offers unique promise to catalyze new classes of soft robots.

Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).