Название: Soft Robotics: A DIY Introduction to Squishy, Stretchy, and Flexible Robots
Автор: Matthew Borgatti, Kari Love
Издательство: Maker Media, Inc.
Год: December 13, 2018
Страниц: 224
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 49.1 MB

Soft robotics is an emerging field that approaches robots in new ways, enabling them to operate in environments that are unstructured or unstable and to perform tasks that require delicacy and malleability. It's all about engineering with soft materials — silicone, cloth, balloons, flexible plastics — and combining them in different ways to come up with novel, approachable, and surprising solutions to interesting problems. This book introduces soft-robotics concepts to students, inventors, and makers with easy-to-understand explanations and hands-on DIY projects. The projects use a wide range of tools and techniques — including microcontrollers, 3D printing, laser cutting, mold making, casting, and heat sealing — to create intriguing soft robots and devices. It is tinkering at its finest!

If a traditional robot is made of mostly hard components—for example, metal or plastic—a soft robot is a robot in which primary functional components of the robot are made of soft and flexible materials. These can be lots of different things, from fabric and paper to flexible plastics, silicone, and other rubbers. Even living heart cells have been incorporated into soft robots.

Soft robotics is a brand-new field with tremendous potential. Though nascent and obscure, it stands to revolutionize how human beings interface with machines. Soft robotics is founded on an understanding of how things bend, stretch, and flex, which is completely at odds with traditional perspectives on mechanical engineering that seek to eliminate these aspects of matter as much as possible. We feel there’s an alternative path, one where you steer into softness and use what you find there.

This book is intended to be an easy-to-follow overview of the building blocks of soft robotics. By following along, you will be able to build your own compliant mechanisms and evaluate their potential applications for yourself. Throughout this book you can learn to build cable-pull tripods, vacuum powered grippers, and even a programmable soft robotic claw.

Some chapters describe how to build equipment (like the vacuum chamber) that will help you build some of the more unusual mechanisms. Other chapters have short, bite-sized experiments you can build in an hour or less. Finally, there are some in-depth chapters on complex mechanisms or multi-day builds. These more complex tutorials contain something called the “Fabrication Rundown”; these sections give you a high-level overview of the process along with a timeline and checklist to make certain they’re as easy to follow and replicate as possible.

To use the “Fabrication Rundown,” we recommend that you first read the entire tutorial and then return to the rundown once you’ve gathered your materials and are ready to begin building the project. From there, you can get a clear timeline for executing the project and check off steps as you complete them.

All of the project files used in this book are available on Github in a repository named “MakeSoftRobots”.

This book leans toward pneumatics as a power source, since that is what the authors have the most experience with. However, the projects in the chapters give you an overview of a wide variety of mechanisms to make certain you’ve got multiple directions to explore should you decide to pursue your own soft robot creations.

• World's first DIY project book on soft robotics
• Written by designers working on the forefront of the field
• Approaches projects from simple introductions to more complex designs that build on what you know
• Explore robotics using novel materials and techniques you can apply to challenges far outside of robotics
• Soft robotics DIY projects that are relatively affordable, accessible and achievable.
• Explore and build creations from the brand new emerging field of robotics
• Provides context on the field of soft robotics alongside hands-on learning
• Teaches skills frequently overlooked
• Projects that are aesthetically appealing and novel
• Foreword by Chris Atkeson, whose research directly inspired the design of Big Hero 6's Baymax