DEVELOPMENT OF TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZED 3D PRINTED SOFT GRIPPERS AND DIELECTRIC SOFT SENSORS

Abstract

Soft robots are continuum structures made from intrinsically soft and/or flexible materials that undergo large elastic deformation to generate desired locomotion in normal operations. Comparing with conventional rigid-bodied robots, the soft robots are conformable to their working environments and capable of absorbing energy arising from collisions to ensure human-safe interactions. Soft robotics aim to equip robots for the unpredictable needs of unstructured scenarios by endowing them with capabilities that are not based on control systems but on material properties and structure of their bodies. The development of this growing field is enabled by combinations of new modeling and designing approaches to automatically create structures of soft robots, new materials and fabrication techniques to directly fabricate them, and new sensing and controlling algorithms to efficiently capture and predict their dynamics. In this thesis, I mainly focusing on the issues associated with designing, fabrication and sensing of soft robots.