FDM Printing: a Fabrication Method for Fluidic Soft Circuits?
Robotics
2023-12-05 v1
Abstract
Existing fluidic soft logic gates for the control of soft robots either rely on extensive manual fabrication processes or expensive printing techniques. In our work, we explore Fused Deposition Modeling for creating fully 3D printed fluidic logic gates. We print a soft bistable valve from thermoplastic polyurethane using a desktop FDM printer. We introduce a new printing nozzle for extruding tubing. Our fabrication strategy reduces the production time of soft bistable valves from 27 hours with replica molding to 3 hours with a FDM printer. Our rapid and cost-effective fabrication process for fluidic logic gates seeks to democratize fluidic circuitry for the control of soft robots.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2312.01131,
title = {FDM Printing: a Fabrication Method for Fluidic Soft Circuits?},
author = {Savita V. Kendre and Lehong Wang and Ethan Wilke and Nicholas Pacheco and Loris Fichera and Markus P. Nemitz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.01131},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
6 pages, 8 figures, IEEE RoboSoft 2023