He and his colleagues used a PolyJet 3-D printer, a type that sets down a liquid layer, exposes it to a light that solidifies it and then adds the next layer. “Never once has it been done all in a single run,” he says, “to have an entire soft robot with all of the integrated fluidic circuitry and the body features and the soft actuators all printed.” That is why Sochol is so excited about printing them in one step. Printing It Upīut in making soft robots more sophisticated, fluidic circuits also render the machines harder to manufacture and assemble. In the Mario-playing hand, for example, the circuit allowed a single source of fluid to send different signals, telling each finger to move independently by simply varying the input pressure. “They introduced much more complicated microfluidic circuits,” says Harvard University engineering professor Jennifer Lewis, who co-authored the 2016 paper but was not involved in the University of Maryland’s project. In the new study, the researchers stepped up the development of this technology. In such circuits, water or air moves through microchannels its flow is modified by fluid-based analogues to electronic components such as transistors and diodes. To make that octopuslike soft robot work, its creators had to ditch rigid electronic circuits for a microfluidic one. It was not until 2016 that researchers created one entirely from flexible materials. But so far most such bots still include at least some rigid components. This makes them good candidates for tasks such as performing surgery or search and rescue and even sorting fruit or other easily damaged items. These bots’ squishy makeup lets them interact with delicate materials-such as tissues in a human body-without the kind of damage more rigid machines might cause. One-step production would make it easier for researchers to develop increasingly complex soft robots. “Every one of those robots in this paper was 100 percent no-assembly-required-printed,” says co-author Ryan Sochol, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland. The Mario-playing hand, as well as two turtlelike “soft robots” described in the same recent Science Advances paper, were each 3-D-printed in a single process that only took three to eight hours. Although quickly pressing and releasing the buttons and directional pad on a Nintendo Entertainment System controller is a fun test of this three-fingered machine’s performance, the real breakthrough is not what it does-but how it was created. A soft robotic hand has finally achieved a historic accomplishment: beating the first level of Super Mario Bros.
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