Soft robots designed and printed in one step with integrated controls
Towards end-to-end co-design for one-shot printable task-specific soft robots
Robotics
Summary
Designing soft robots usually means choosing their shape and controls separately, which can make them hard to build. The authors created a computer simulation that designs soft robots all at once—including materials, where movable parts go, and how they move—that can be printed in one piece. They tested this with soft robot arms that follow specific motions, printing them directly from the computer design. The printed robots moved just like the simulations predicted, showing this method can go straight from design to real, working soft robots.
What this means in practice
- •For robotics engineers: Create task-specific soft robot arms directly from simulation designs with integrated actuators and no manual assembly.
- •For prosthetics designers: Fabricate customized soft robotic components in one step with optimized shapes and control for user-specific motions.
Authors
James Wood, André Farinha, Will Browne, Josh Pinskier, Krishna Manaswi Digumarti
Abstract
Soft robot co-design methods can jointly optimise morphology and control, but the resulting designs are often difficult to manufacture, while manufacturable approaches typically restrict actuator placement or require manual assembly. We present a simulation-based co-design framework that jointly optimises material distribution, pneumatic actuator placement and orientation, and control, while producing designs that can be fabricated monolithically using fused deposition modelling. The framework uses a differentiable 2D plane-stress Material Point Method simulator, incorporating an experimentally validated material model and an empirically derived surrogate model of a 3D-printed inflatable actuator. We demonstrate gradient-based optimisation soft robotic arms for prescribed tip trajectories. Optimised designs are transferred directly from simulation to one-shot monolithic FDM fabrication, with integrated actuators and no post-assembly. Physical experiments demonstrate that the resulting arms reproduce the behaviour predicted in simulation. This framework provides a path from task-level objectives to physically realisable soft robots while retaining substantial freedom over both morphology and actuation.