Creative Soft Robotics

Sunjana: I was out sick with Covid this whole week, but today I designed some molds that would enable me to do a color overlap using only 2 layers. One layer would consist of the 2 colors (red and blue for example), while the other layer would enable one of the colors (blue) to travel
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Sunjana After last week’s failure with the locking mechanism, this week, I attempted to try two locking mechanisms, one with .5mm thick channels, 3 horizontal, 3 vertical, and one with .5mm thick channels, 3 horizontal, 2 vertical. With the first mechanism, I tried bonding using Elmer’s glue, which worked poorly. With the second one, I
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This week’s progress This week we were able to successfully integrate 1 motor pump into the body of the jellyfish. We desired the mold to allow for 3 motor pumps to be attached, one on each tentacle of the jellyfish. However, during the bonding process, 2 of the air channels from the motor pump to
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Inbar: This week I attempted the full robot fabrication again. I was successful in creating the divided molds parts and then glueing them together – After that, I tried casting the silicone and bonding the top and bottom. Unfortunately, non of the parts in the model I cast inflates properly – it seems like air
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Objectives from the past week Create a new jellyfish that uses the hydraulic pump Wire and test it in the fish tank Summary of week progress We modified the existing jellyfish design to take input from the hydraulic pumps rather than a hand pump/syringe. Each of the three pumps controls a tentacle. Since the mold
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This week, Sunjana worked on trying to reverse engineer this locking effect in the Venous Materials paper. It appears that there were 3 layers of pattern involved in this effect: the regular channel connected to the repository at the bottom, the vertical grid channels, and the horizontal grid channels. Sunjana has sent molds of each
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Results Jason: This latest iteration corrected many of the mistakes made during the previous iteration. The most drastic design change was the chamber designs. It retained the Whiteside’s thin chambers but with a two-millimeter gap between surfaces. The biggest change was in varying distances between the edge and angle with the chambers. This change was
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Objectives for this week Update the tentacle shape to prevent inflating and cause bending. Create new mold, and fabricate the new jellyfish Test the new jellyfish in the tank Stretch goal: test with pneumatic system Summary of Week Results We created a new jellyfish tentacle design that had smaller cavities and air channel so that
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Progress Update: This week I attempted to make a 2-part mold version of the heart I made previously. As you can see, the right half of the mold had a bunch of bubbles, but this ended up not being an issue at all for that half of the mold as almost all the bubbles popped
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This week we attempted to use a fabric stiffening technique in order to increase stiffness and allow for more curvature. We followed the technique that can be viewed in this video – https://youtu.be/TyYW9BmMeSs We both made changes to our existing parts molds and then attempted casting, incorporating the fabric. Results Jason: For this iteration, I
Continue reading Jason and Inbar | Weekly Report