Creative Soft Robotics

We have been iterating through different auxetic designs using Rhino and running FEA simulations in Solidworks to find interesting auxetic behaviors. At this stage, our simulations are working to inform a design that we will print. The start of the week was getting each of the softwares working, but by the end of the week
Continue reading Progress Report 2: Dunn and Elliot

Last week we tested our cast silicone flowers again and one of them inflated. While we were hoping for a greater degree of movement, this test still confirmed our main design, and we decided to include notches in our second iteration to help with flexibility. We have also printed out a new mold with cuts
Continue reading Progress Report 2- Aditti and Catherine

End of Week Report new mold 1 – full bracelet prototype This is a mold for a full bracelet with the ability to be tied together or clasped? If you fill this whole mold up it should make one full bracelet. Also this has the thinnest tube we have done so far with a .5mm
Continue reading Week 2 Report – Fiona and Gia

This week we attempt to use two different designs to solve the problems that arose last week. The first design is a hard ABS with a hinge structure. As you can see in the screenshot, the gray part is the ABS rigid tissue and the blue part is the silicone and the air hose. There
Continue reading Weekly Reports 2 — Maddie and Xiaofan

This week we tested our first version of our silicon anemone and we made progress on programming and circuiting the electronics. We originally planned to print our newest version of the mold, but since the 3D printers were down, we had to postpone our plans. Monday, 3.20: Tuesday, 3.21: Wednesday, 3.22: Sunday, 3.26:

This week we worked on casting and bonding the template moulds for our flower actuator. We did two different designs and did one iteration of the first design and two iterations of the second design – one coloured and one clear. There are still some leaks in our bonding, which we plan to patch with
Continue reading Progress Report – Catherine & Aditti

Ideas we wanna test the next couple weeks: Beginning of the week plans We want to print 2 different molds this week to test the concepts above. This is a rough first plan before attempting anything. Things we need to figure out in the future End of Week Report For this week we got two
Continue reading Week 1 Report – Fiona and Gia

This week was set to be some background work for more work to come, so we focused on planning ahead, researching, and prototyping. More specifically, we looked to creating a semester schedule, designing a new mold, and casting our previously-made four-part mode. Monday, 3.13: Wednesday, 3.15: Thursday, 3.16: Moving Forward:

Unfortunately, this first version of the model did not work well. You can see that the silicone bends at an angle of only 10-15 degrees. This is far below our expectations. Another problem is the “balloon”. Also this week we tried to cast the wire in silicone and tried to connect to a power source
Continue reading Weekly Reports — Maddie and Xiaofan

Pivoting from focusing on the practical application to utilizing the interesting properties of the material that we have chosen. By focusing on what we wanted the result to look like then working backwards, we pigeonholed ourselves and lost sight of what we were trying to achieve. Our new prototype with the stiffer silicone worked much
Continue reading Progress Report – Dunn and Elliot