I’ve been working on this project for a few months, focused on changing how soft robots get designed and made. Traditionally these robots are complex to design and build, and they require and unexpectedly large amount of hand labor to stitch together. This ends up with parts being produced slowly, with small deviations from known working designs. I’ve been trying to come up with a method that allows you to design a robot in CAD, queue up the design on a powder printer, cast silicone into the printed mold, and pull out a working robot. The idea is to allow for a huge variety of geometry, experimentation, and prototypes that are quick and inexpensive to produce. I want to make the process a whole lot more like a scientific experiment, where you test and observe multiple samples while adjusting a single variable.