Additive Manufacture of Composite Soft Pneumatic Actuators

This article presents a direct additive manufacturing method for composite material soft pneumatic actuators that are capable of performing a range of programmable motions. Commonly, molding is the method used to manufacture soft fluidic actuators. This is material, labor, and time intensive and lacks the design freedom to produce custom actuators efficiently. This article proposes an alternative semiautomated method of designing and manufacturing composite soft actuators. An affordable, open-source, desktop three-dimensional (3D) printer was modified into a four-axis, combined, fused deposition modeling, and paste extrusion printer. A Grasshopper 3D algorithm was devised to implement custom actuator designs according to user inputs, resulting in a G-code print file. Bending, contracting, and twisting motion actuators were parametrically designed and subsequently additively manufactured from silicone and thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) materials. Experimental testing was completed on these actuators along with their constitutive materials. Finite element models were created to simulate the actuator's kinematic performance. Having a platform method to digitally configure and directly additively manufacture custom-motion, composite soft actuators has the potential to accelerate the development of more intricate designs and lead to potential impacts in a range of areas, including in-clinic personalization of soft assistive devices and patient-specific biomedical devices.