Programmable Deformation Design of Porous Soft Actuator through Volumetric-Pattern-Induced Anisotropy
Canqi Meng, Weibang Bai
AI summary
Problem
Conventional soft pneumatic actuators suffer from poor structural support and require expensive, geometry-specific redesigns for new functions, while porous actuator research largely treats foam as passive support rather than an active deformation driver.
Approach
The method incises specific transverse, longitudinal, and diagonal patterns into cylindrical open-cell foam cores to induce localized structural anisotropy, guiding asymmetric deformation under a uniform vacuum input.
Key results
- Achieved up to 80° bending, 18° tilting, and 115° twisting by optimizing incision array density
- Developed a high-fidelity FEA model capturing foam densification and deformation mechanics
- Demonstrated mold-less rapid prototyping and pattern scalability across varying substrate geometries
- Created a bio-inspired soft gripper by translating human hand crease maps into functional incision patterns
Why it matters
Offers a scalable, cost-effective design paradigm for multi-functional soft robots by encoding complex motions directly into the substrate material.
Abstract
Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials, such as foam, filled into chambers, can provide structural stability to the actuators. However, methods to achieve programmable deformation by tailoring the porous body itself remain under- explored. In this paper, a novel design method is presented to realize soft porous actuators with programmable deformation by incising specific patterns into the porous foam body. This approach introduces localized structural anisotropy of the foam, guiding the material’s deformation under a global vacuum input. Furthermore, three fundamental patterns on a cylindrical foam substrate are discussed: transverse for bending, longitu- dinal for tilting, and diagonal for twisting. A computational model is built with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to investigate the mechanism of the incision-patterning method. Experiments demonstrate that with a potential optimal design of the pattern array number N, actuators can achieve bending up to 80◦(N=2), tilting of 18◦(N=1), and twisting of 115◦(N=8). The versatility of our approach is demonstrated via pattern transferability, scalability, and mold-less rapid prototyping of complex designs. As a comprehensive application, we translate the human hand crease map into a functional incision pattern, creating a bio- inspired soft gripper capable of human-like adaptive grasping. Our work provides a new, efficient, and scalable paradigm for the design of multi-functional soft porous robots.