Large-scale integration of soft robotic and fluidic devices

Soft robotics – robots composed of soft materials, elastomers – is an on-going paradigm shift in robotics research. Soft robots typically have soft fluidic actuators, use fluidic circuits, and are fabricated using a combination of monolithic fabrication methods e.g. 3D-printing, casting and lithography. This monolithic fabrication is potentially a huge advantage over traditional, hard robots: you could fabricate very complex soft robots with practically no added cost over simple designs. However, today this potential is largely unrealized, partially because the design and integration of soft robots is still very much a manual task. In this project, we will develop methods for the large-scale integration of soft robotic and fluidic devices. We will implement a compiler to generate soft robotic devices from text-based descriptions. This project paves the way to realizing the full potential of soft robotics, by allowing designing soft robots more complex than ever before.