Programmable Deformation Design of Porous Soft Actuator through Volumetric-Pattern-Induced Anisotropy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for designing soft porous actuators with programmable deformation by patterning the porous material, enabling multimodal functions like bending, tilting, and twisting with scalable, mold-less fabrication.

Contribution

The study presents a new incision-patterning technique to induce localized anisotropy in porous foam, allowing programmable deformation modes in soft actuators, supported by computational modeling and experimental validation.

Findings

Achieved up to 80° bending with pattern N=2

Demonstrated tilting of 18° with pattern N=1

Realized twisting of 115° with pattern N=8

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 for the actuators. However, methods to achieve programmable deformation by tailoring the porous body itself remain underexplored. 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, longitudinal 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 $80^{\circ}$ (N=2), tilting of $18^{\circ}$ (N=1), and twisting of $115^{\circ}$ (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 robot hand capable of human-like adaptive grasping. Our work provides a new, efficient, and scalable paradigm for the design of multi-functional soft porous robots.