Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a method to create soft, flexible, 3-D printed robots without the use of special equipment. This new method makes it faster and cheaper to produce the robots, which can be used for a variety of different purposes.
The engineers developed the new method by venturing off the path of how soft robots are normally built, which is by adding soft materials to a rigid robot body. Instead, the team of researchers started with a soft body and added rigid features to it. Inspiration for the robots came from insect exoskeletons, which consist of both soft and rigid components. The team calls the creations “flexoskeletons.”
The new method for developing these robots makes it much faster to construct soft components. It takes just a fraction of the time previously required, and it is much cheaper than before.
Nick Gravish is a mechanical engineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and the paper’s senior author.
“We hope that these how much do computer scientists make will lead to the creation of a new class of soft, bioinspired robots,” said Gravish. “We want to make soft robots easier to build for researchers all over the world.”
With the new method, large groups of flexoskeleton robots can be built with little manual assembly. It allows for the creation of separate components that are interchangeable, allowing robot parts to be swapped.
The engineers developed the new method by venturing off the path of how soft robots are normally built, which is by adding soft materials to a rigid robot body. Instead, the team of researchers started with a soft body and added rigid features to it. Inspiration for the robots came from insect exoskeletons, which consist of both soft and rigid components. The team calls the creations “flexoskeletons.”
The new method for developing these robots makes it much faster to construct soft components. It takes just a fraction of the time previously required, and it is much cheaper than before.
Nick Gravish is a mechanical engineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and the paper’s senior author.
“We hope that these how much do computer scientists make will lead to the creation of a new class of soft, bioinspired robots,” said Gravish. “We want to make soft robots easier to build for researchers all over the world.”
With the new method, large groups of flexoskeleton robots can be built with little manual assembly. It allows for the creation of separate components that are interchangeable, allowing robot parts to be swapped.
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