Soft Pneumatic Actuator with Adjustable Stiffness Layers for Multi-DoF Actuation

The soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are a solution toward the highly customizable and light actuators with the versatility of actuation modes, and an inherent compliance. Such flexibility allows SPAs to be considered as alternative actuators for wearable rehabilitative devices and search and rescue robots. The actuator material and air-chamber design dictate the actuator's mechanical performance. Therefore, each actuator design with a single pressure source produces a highly customized motion but only a single degree of freedom (DoF). We present a novel design and fabrication method for a SPA with different modes of actuation using integrated adjustable stiffness layers (ASLs). Unlike the most SPA designs where one independent chamber is needed for each mode of actuation, here we have a single chamber that drives three different modes of actuation by activating different combinations of ASLs. Adapting customized micro heaters and thermistors for modulating the temperature and stiffness of ASLs, we considerably broaden the work space of the SPA actuator. Here, a thorough characterization of the materials and the modeling of the actuator are presented. We propose a design methodology for developing application specific actuators with multi-DoFs that are light and compact.