Design and analysis of a soft pneumatic actuator to develop modular soft robotic systems

In this paper, we describe the design and analysis of a Soft Cubic Module (SCM) with a single internal pneumatically actuated chamber. The actuation chamber’s shape, size and, orientation have been evaluated to realize a soft robotic actuator which can be further employed for the development of modular soft robotic systems. SCM can be easily manufactured through the molding process and it is composed of single soft material, the silicone polymer. Its external shape allows utilization of this module as a single block actuator as well as makes it easy to combine multiple SCM modules to build multiunit soft robotic systems. We consider it as our first tool to investigate whether the SCM scheme is sufficient to build soft robots which would be able to perform certain given tasks in various configurations like a soft gripper, bio-mimetic crawling mechanism or multi-axis manipulator. So far, the results obtained are encouraging in order to further develop and employ the SCM design scheme, focusing on its further geometrical optimization for both standalone configuration and assembly of multiple modules to realize novel, economic and easy to fabricate soft robotic systems.