Monday, 3.20:

• Check cast and sealing, success!
• Note: this prototype likely will not work for directional pnematics
• Seal two halves together
• Continue creating mold
• Finished the coding portion: capacitive wire will sense touch (not squeeze FINALLY)

Tuesday, 3.21:

• Check casting and sealing, success
• Sealed together the other two halves with a wire in between for future sensitivity testing

Wednesday, 3.22:

• Finished mold
• Tested blowing up 2 channel cast
• Reference to above note: DOES work for directional pneumatics. Requires a lot of air for a significant bend, but does work.
• Test sensitivity code with two channel cast + wire embedded in silicon
• Raw threshold: 0

Sunday, 3.26:

• Worked on circuiting and programming the MOSFET driver, slow progress.
• Wrote this process log post

We were given the circuitry for the capacitor sensor. While we didn’t work on this ourselves, it is a great first step to what we hope to accomplish.

Also worth talking about is our original designs for the mold. Our original mold designs were failures, but worth talking about since they were our first experimentation with silicon molds. They were designed to imitate the look of our project but not the functionality. The top section of Elise’s was too thin and had holes in it. Leah’s had some sizing issues with the hole to insert the piping, and it failed to completely seal when putting the two halves together.

That said, we used our original molds to test the capacitor sensing, and we realized that we ran into a problem. Though it seems obvious in retrospect, inserting the wire into the mold caused the capacitor to constantly be true – it sensed something (the silicon mold and piping) nearby.

UPDATE: the calibration of the capacitor can make this work. The capacitor doesn’t sense the mold, but can sense a hand in close proximity through the silicon. More work is required to fully understand what is happening. It is really finicky, alternating between just always being true, working just right, to requiring direct touch to the wire to sense the hand.

The inspiration for this mold was some sort of twig or leaf-like thing. The goal was to make it long and straight as a test run before making the official mold design for our project – which is inspired by a sea anemone. As it’s my first mold, I went very simple and also referenced the example given for the assignment.

https://urth.co/magazine/the-underwater-art-installations-preserving-our-marine-life

Expression and Intention

The artist is seeking to use underwater art installations to double as artificial reefs. The sculptures submerged in the ocean all seem to have a common theme that echoes back to the lives of humans. They portray events such as the financial crash of 2008, the refugee crisis and other large events. Most of the sculptures cast negative light on human existence, but a few sculptures cast a positive light on the way humans can work together to help the environment. Furthermore, these art installations provide a base to build up reefs that have been destroyed. The idea of tragedy and rebuilding afterwards seems especially prevalent as a theme in the art installations.

Alternative Expression

There are a variety of different ways to explore the idea of underwater preservation. In particular, I imagine using soft technologies to to create an entirely fake underwater ecosystem. Silicon and various other soft materials could be used to imitate fish, plants and reefs. In a way, it wouldn’t just be preservation or rebuilding, but it would be creating an entirely new ecosystem.

Technical Papers

A. T. Jones and R. W. Welsford, “Artificial reefs in British Columbia, Canada,” Oceans ’97. MTS/IEEE Conference Proceedings, Halifax, NS, Canada, 1997, pp. 415-418 vol.1, doi: 10.1109/OCEANS.1997.634399.

J. Luong et al., “Eversion and Retraction of a Soft Robot Towards the Exploration of Coral Reefs,” 2019 2nd IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), Seoul, Korea (South), 2019, pp. 801-807, doi: 10.1109/ROBOSOFT.2019.8722730.

Polen Budak, E., Zirhli, O., Stokes, A. A., & Akbulut, O. (2016). The Breathing Wall (Brall)–Triggering Life (In) Animate Surfaces. Leonardo, 49(2), 162–163. https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_01199

The “breathing wall” is a structure that can respond in an organic matter to touch and stimulus. The idea of an “organic” city seems interesting to me. It doesn’t seem very practical, but I think it is an interesting experiment in bridging the gap between hard structures and life.

Tales of C

https://jonasjoergensen.org/critical-making/works/

Similar to the “breathing wall,” I chose this artwork because it imitates life. Not only does it mimic the movements of a cephalopod, but it also has its own language of sorts. It randomly generates things to say from various sources, which creates a form of story for it.

1. Do you have any conflict of interest in reviewing this paper?
   • No
2. Expertise. Provide your expertise in the topic area of this paper.
   • 2 – Passing Knowledge
3. Summary. Please summarize what you believe are the paper’s main contributions to the field of soft robotics.
   • The authors of the paper contributed a design of new magnet connectors for modularized soft robot units. While the magnet connectors had lower maximum connecting strength than a previously designed screw-thread connector, these new connectors are easily modified, affordable, and simpler to assemble and disassemble. In addition, they used off the shelf magnets, which would make these connectors more accessible to the public. Overall, the paper contributed a new way to link soft units, which could be developed upon to be stronger while still maintaining their flexible and affordable benefits.
4. Strengths and Weaknesses. What are the main strengths and weaknesses of this work? Does the paper have strengths in originality and novelty?
   • The strength of this work is in its simplicity. Despite my lack of knowledge of the field, it was easy to understand. The paper aimed to explore something it described as “intuitive,” which made the paper more accessible. While the paper’s results were interesting and practical, it lacked originality and novelty. It didn’t push the industry as forward as it could be.
5. Soundness. Are the ideas, algorithms, results or studies technologically/methodologically sound?
   • This paper is very sound. The introduction to the paper explains their reasons behind their design and material choices. Furthermore, it takes the time to test the design and fabrication, including a bending performance test and connecting force test. I think the paper could take the tests a bit further by testing the effectiveness of them as a part of a fully designed soft robot.
6. Related Work. Does the paper adequately describe related and prior work?
   • It does reference previous work, but the description of the prior work is lacking. It makes frequent reference to their previous research and designs without going into detail about what they entailed.
7. Presentation. Is the paper well organized, well written and clearly presented?
   • It is very well organized and presented. It follows a natural pattern of moving from introduction, description of the design and fabrication, experimental setups, results and discussion to conclusion. It is easy to follow and understand because it follows the authors along with their thought process.
8. Suggestions. Do you have suggestions for improving this paper?
   •  My first suggestion would be to expand upon the previous research mentioned in the paper. Since the screw-thread connector is frequently mentioned, it would be helpful to compare the specific findings of the connecting force and bending performance tests of the two different types of connectors.
   • The description of future plans is sparce and vague. The paper could go into further details about future works. It doesn’t make any specific description, but instead it vaguely sets the goal of improving the design all around.
   • The discussion section brings up multiple benefits to the magnet connector that could be expanded upon with tests. For example, it is mentioned that the magnet connectors can attach to magnetic surfaces to be used as hooks. However, no test was performed to see how much weight the magnet connectors can hold.
9. Comments to Committee (Hidden from authors). Does the paper have enough originality and importance to merit publication? Is the paper relevant to the field? These comments will NOT be sent to the authors
   • This paper has enough originality and importance to merit publication. Though simple, this paper could serve as a solid foundation for future work and development in the field of connectors for modularized soft units. The magnet connector is a new innovation that could also serve as a key element of future soft robotic designs. It is well written and easy to understand, and thus merits publication.
10. Overall Rating. Provide your overall rating of the paper (5 is best)
    • 4 – Probably accept: I would argue for accepting this paper.

Source

Y. Zhang, L. Ge, J. Zou, H. Xu and G. Gu, “A Multimodal Soft Crawling-Climbing Robot with the Controllable Horizontal Plane to Slope Transition,” 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau, China, 2019, pp. 3343-3348, doi: 10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968297.

Root

H. Guo, J. Zhang, T. Wang, Y. Li, J. Hong and Y. Li, “Design and control of an inchworm-inspired soft robot with omega-arching locomotion,” 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Singapore, 2017, pp. 4154-4159, doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989477.

Related Works

N. Wang, M. He, Y. Cui, Y. Sun and P. Qi, “A Soft Pneumatic Crawling Robot with Unbalanced Inflation,” 2020 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), Boston, MA, USA, 2020, pp. 138-143, doi: 10.1109/AIM43001.2020.9158925.

Y. Xu, T. Wang and Z. Wang, “A soft actuator with integrated pneumatic source using electrically induced liquid-to-gas conversion,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), Sanya, China, 2021, pp. 249-254, doi: 10.1109/ROBIO54168.2021.9739313.

F. Xu and H. Wang, “Soft Robotics: Morphology and Morphology-inspired Motion Strategy,” in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, vol. 8, no. 9, pp. 1500-1522, September 2021, doi: 10.1109/JAS.2021.1004105.

Y. Kim, Y. Lee and Y. Cha, “Origami Pump Actuator Based Pneumatic Quadruped Robot (OPARO),” in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 41010-41018, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3065402.