I developed this static mixer design to streamline casting demos. Often times, a casting demo can get bogged down with portioning, mixing, and degassing, especially when you’re trying to have a group of students get hands-on time with the casting materials.
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After testing the Flat-Pack Camera Arm, I was pretty happy with the results. Happy, except for one detail: the joint at the base of the arm would creep down over time. This wasn’t a problem while taking shots of projects at the bench, given how often I’d have to reposition it. The big pain was trying to capture time lapses. The creep was just too noticeable, and it would never stay in place long enough to keep the action of a day’s work in frame.
This will be an update on the things I’ve learned molding quadrupeds over the last couple of months and some previews of the new robots I’ll be experimenting with in the next few weeks. To start, I’ve had the chance to run a gaggle of design experiments ranging from small changes to the particular silicone I’ve been casting, to more radical changes to how the whole plionics manufacturing process comes together.
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Visit my soft robot Flickr collection for some detailed documentation and more info on the methods behind this latest robot.
Quadrupeds. I’ve been dreaming about quadrupeds. I’ve been hunting for challenges to test my methods and improve the engineering on the whole “print and cast a soft robot” thing (I really need to come up with a name for this… “Borgatronics?”). I started with tentacles because they were easy to design, easy to test, and symmetrical.
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Mold making and casting has been a huge part of my life for years. It started in the SFX industry, making molds and cleaning up parts for robotic snakes on Snakes on a Plane (really), and has become an even more significant factor with the recent soft robotics project. However, one thing has plagued me this whole time: buckets.
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Last week I headed up to Viridis3d for some more hacking. We got some beautiful results using some vaccuum casting with the trefoil design, parts printed for both the internals and outer shell of the quadruped, and schemes for tempting new mechanisms. All in all it’s been really exciting seeing the progress. Also, I have some updates on controlling the trefoil tentacle with an arduino powered set of air solenoids.
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I’ve finally gathered my wits after a whirlwind tour of Europe, starting at CCC, giving some talks and connecting up with potential collaborators, to Berlin to meet hackers I hadn’t seen in years, to Brussels to play with some material science experiments in impact resisting plastics. While at CCC I gave three talks, two lightning talks on digital fabrication and the strange world of news advertisement, and a 15 minute talk on the methodology and philosophy behind my soft robots.
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I have lots of updates to share. First, there’s a new video of the latest tentacle prototype in action below the fold. Second, We’ve made some excellent progress on the method of manufacture, reliability, and repeatability of the designs we’re producing. It’s almost at the point where we need to figure out a good real-world experiment to test our ideas against. I’m currently torn between creating a grasper and something that walks. Jim and I have been working out ways of getting a self contained power source inside of a soft robot, and it seems like we might be able to use a canister of compressed gas to do everything from timing movements to articulating valves. I’m working out ways of integrating peristaltic pumps and timing mechanisms that will be simple to prototype… which is a pretty tall order. However, I think a combo of laser cut bits and creative molding can have this one solved.
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After only six actual work days, a few afternoons spent on CAD, and a lot of tweaking, I’ve got a working robotic tentacle prototype! I used the hand pump off of a sphygmomanometer and a lot of sil-poxy, but it’s working in a rough and ready way. There’s video after the jump below.
I had to cut this one open to fully remove all the core and then sealed it back up. I think the next version will evacuate the core cleanly due to the powder tweaks we made, though. It could also use some revisions to the way it interfaces with the air supply. In the future I’m going to have to run some tests on adhering silicone to various plastics to see what will make for the most solid fittings. The sil-poxy infosheet says polyurethanes are a good candidate, so I might start there.
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