3D Knitting for Pneumatic Soft Robotics

摘要

Soft robots adapt passively to complex environments due to their inherentcompliance, allowing them to interact safely with fragile or irregular objectsand traverse uneven terrain. The vast tunability and ubiquity of textiles hasenabled new soft robotic capabilities, especially in the field of wearablerobots, but existing textile processing techniques (e.g., cut-and-sew, thermalbonding) are limited in terms of rapid, additive, accessible, and waste-freemanufacturing. While 3D knitting has the potential to address these limitations,an incomplete understanding of the impact of structure and materialon knit-scale mechanical properties and macro-scale device performance hasprecluded the widespread adoption of knitted robots. In this work, the rolesof knit structure and yarn material properties on textile mechanics spanningthree regimes–unfolding, geometric rearrangement, and yarn stretching–areelucidated and shown to be tailorable across unique knit architectures andyarn materials. Based on this understanding, 3D knit soft actuators for extension,contraction, and bending are constructed. Combining these actuationprimitives enables the monolithic fabrication of entire soft grippers androbots in a single-step additive manufacturing procedure suitable for a varietyof applications. This approach represents a first step in seamlessly “printing”conformal, low-cost, customizable textile-based soft robots on-demand.