A brief study on additively manufactured soft pneumatic actuators

Abstract

Humans and robot's interaction is gradually increasing day by day in production environments and assembly operations etc. and robot's environments is not safe for humans. Soft robotic actuators have sought to improve human-machine interaction, or imitating the softness and flexibility. Many soft actuators are composed of soft fluidic actuators that are fabricated from hyper elastic materials i.e., silicon, rubber etc. and use hydraulic or pneumatic actuation. Due to presence of strong non-linearities and complex geometries in soft actuators 3D printing is the best additive manufacturing technique to fabricate the soft pneumatic actuator. Herein, the literature additively manufactured soft pneumatic actuators are reviewed. Finite element modeling provides an effective solution and allows us to predict performance and optimize soft actuators designs. First, the additive manufacturing methods for soft actuators will be discussed. Then, a comprehensive review of constitutive model parameters for the most widely used silicon rubbers in the article is provided. Through this article an attempt is made to highlight the modeling procedures, material properties and design guidelines by analyzing the available research work in this field.