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Soft Robots Embedded with Stretchable Arduinos

Commercial and open-source electronic circuit boards are widely used for controlling robots. However, their rigid form makes it difficult to embed them into soft robots. Watch this video to see how a group of Yale researchers overcame this problem.

“We were able to overcome the usual obstacles with our manufacturing process and actually create many stretchable Arduinos,” said Stephanie Woodman  , lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student in Kramer-Bottiglio’s lab.

Topics:
Automation Materials Robotics

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 here we present a generalized method to translate two- layer circuits into soft stretchable forms enabling the creation of stretchable arduinos that reliably strained over 328 per. we then embed them into actively stretching parts of several soft robots and systems and use them to control these systems while straining our manufacturing process generalizes to other open source circuit

    00:00:23 designs attaining similar stretch ability in this study we created several commercially available circuits including the Arduino Pro minis an Arduino Lily Pad a spark fun sound detector and a spark fun RGB and gesture sensor our vision is to develop stretchable versions of a wide range of familiar circuits advancing the field of Soft Robotics and wearables by enabling

    00:00:46 the use of common control platforms on board without limiting stretchability our process is compatible with many substrate materials enabling us to embed Arduino Pro minis into two soft robot quadrip heads one with a circuit made from dragon skin 10 elastomer and one with VHB tape the onboard stretchable Arduino is sending gate commands to the pneumatic

    00:01:07 Regulators to control its Locomotion gate while stretching with this technology we take a step towards fully soft systems with state-of-the-art computational ability we can even imagine giving compute power to a fully softed multi-agent system such that each agent can communicate with its neighbors outside of the field of Robotics this

    00:01:34 technology has widespread applications in wearable Electronics enabling designers to collocate sensing and computation anywhere on the Garment even in high strain areas like the elbow for example this Arduino is providing realtime feedback about the user's elbow bending angle by releasing our designs and procedures as open source we hope this

    00:01:54 work will enable further progress embedding computation and sensing into soft systems to create smarter safer robots and wearables that can leverage their compliance without sacrificing compute