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In the past decade, a rich repertoire of soft robots, designed from biomimetic and intuitive approaches, has been developed to overcome challenges faced by their rigid-bodied counterparts. However, these design approaches are greatly limited by the designers' experience and inspiration. In this article, the structural design problem is mathematically modeled under the framework of topology optimization, and solved by a new implementation tool that combines Abaqus/CAE and Matlab coding. Herein, a pneumatic soft gripper with two identical fingers was developed as a practical application. To fulfill the grasping task, each gripper finger is optimized to achieve its maximal bending deformation. The optimized gripper fingers are in high consistence with human fingers as indicated by pseudo-joints. Thereafter, the optimized gripper fingers are directly fabricated by three-dimensional printing technique with unprecedented fidelity regardless of high geometric complexity. Experimental results show that the gripper can grasp an elastic balloon, and each gripper finger is able to undergo a [Formula: see text] free travel bending and exert 0.23 N grasping force upon 0.06 MPa actuation pressure. The proposed approach is freely extendable to develop other types of soft robots and this represents an important step toward the goal of designing and fabricating soft robots automatically.

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Kirigami is the art of paper cutting, and it is emerging as an elegant design and manufacturing solution in mechanical metamaterials. Currently, the majority of kirigami designs focus on shape-morphing, but there is little attention on the remarkable mechanical properties they can produce: high strength to weight ratio where they can bear thousands of times of their own weight. This paper proposes a kirigami-based, strong, yet lightweight metamaterial, which is created by folding pop-up and pop-down from a checkerboard pattern with blocks. To transform the kirigami metamaterial into arbitrary objects, the challenge lies in how to automatically design the kirigami folding to approximate the outline of the object. Herein, a computational model that is based on deploying discretized objects onto a planar sheet is proposed. Additionally, to achieve high strength, a glue-free connector that can lock the collocated cuts in the folded configuration is designed. The standard compression tests show that the kirigami metamaterial, weighing 12.05 g, can carry 346.4 N payloads. Meanwhile, six examples of curved surfaces are prototyped to verify the shape transforming capability of the proposed kirigami metamaterial. This study paves the way towards using the kirigami technique for weight reduction in industrial applications.

This paper proposes a methodology to design, analyze and fabricate a soft compressive sensor, made of dielectric elastomers that are able to recover from large strain. Each module of the compressive sensor is modeled as a capacitor, comprising a DE membrane sandwiched between two compliant electrodes. When the sensor modules aligned in an array were subject to a compressive load, the induced deformation on the corresponding module resulted in capacitance increase. By detecting the capacitance signal, not only the position but also the magnitude of the compressive load were obtained. We built an analytical model to simulate the mechanicalelectrical responses of two common soft sensor structures, namely with and without an embedded air chamber. The simulation results showed that the air embedded prototype improved the sensitivity of the sensor significantly, which was consistent with the experimental results, where the sensitivity is enhanced from 0.05 N −1 to 0.91 N −1 . Furthermore, the effect of the air chamber dimension on the sensitivity is also discussed theoretically and experimentally. It concluded that the detection range increased with the air chamber height over length ratio.

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In nature, climbing trees and pipes of varying diameters or even navigating inside of hollow pipes and tree holes is easy for some climbing animals and insects. However, today's pipeclimbing robots, which are important for automatically conducting periodic inspections and maintenance of pipelines to save time and keep humans away from hazardous environments, are designed mainly for a specific task, limiting their adaptability to different working scenarios and further implementation in real-life. In this paper, we propose a pipe-climbing robot with a soft linear actuator for bioinspired propulsion, two origami clutches to realize multi-degrees-of-freedom (DoF) motion and two pairs of soft modular legs for multimodal climbing. Design, modeling and experimental validation of the origami clutch are introduced in detail. Preliminary experimental results show that we can achieve a stroke of up to 289.6% and a maximum 45 degrees bending angle on the soft linear actuator by regulating the air pressure inside the soft actuator and origami clutches. Additionally, by choosing the leg-type, three climbing modes, including out-pipe versatile mode, out-pipe high-force mode and inpipe mode can be realized for particular working scenarios. A prototype climbing robot demonstrates that in out-pipe versatile mode, the robot can climb on the exterior of pipes made of various materials including PVC, rubber and metal with diameters ranging from 105 to 117 mm. In the out-pipe high-force mode, the climber can navigate along a specific pipe carrying maximum 675 g external load at the top or 200 g hanging from the bottom, as well as keeping functional without failure under static loads as high as 1968 g. In the in-pipe mode, the robot is able to travel inside pipes. This research might bridge the design gap between in-pipe and out-pipe climbing robots while offering an alternative option for soft robots to execute multi-DoF motion.