Stretchable Arduinos embedded in soft robots

Fuente: arXiv
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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Woodman, Stephanie J., Shah, Dylan S., Landesberg, Melanie, Agrawala, Anjali, Kramer-Bottiglio, Rebecca
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Woodman, Stephanie J.
Shah, Dylan S.
Landesberg, Melanie
Agrawala, Anjali
Kramer-Bottiglio, Rebecca
author_facet Woodman, Stephanie J.
Shah, Dylan S.
Landesberg, Melanie
Agrawala, Anjali
Kramer-Bottiglio, Rebecca
contents To achieve real-world functionality, robots must have the ability to carry out decision-making computations. However, soft robots stretch and therefore need a solution other than rigid computers. Examples of embedding computing capacity into soft robots currently include appending rigid printed circuit boards (PCBs) to the robot, integrating soft logic gates, and exploiting material responses for material-embedded computation. Although promising, these approaches introduce limitations such as rigidity, tethers, or low logic gate density. The field of stretchable electronics has sought to solve these challenges, but a complete pipeline for direct integration of single-board computers, microcontrollers, and other complex circuitry into soft robots has remained elusive. We present a generalized method to translate any complex two-layer circuit into a soft, stretchable form. This enabled the creation of stretchable single-board microcontrollers (including Arduinos) and other commercial circuits (including Sparkfun circuits), without design simplifications. As demonstrations of the method's utility, we embed highly stretchable (>300% strain) Arduino Pro Minis into the bodies of multiple soft robots. This makes use of otherwise inert structural material, fulfilling the promise of the stretchable electronics field to integrate state-of-the-art computational power into robust, stretchable systems during active use.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_10333
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stretchable Arduinos embedded in soft robots
Woodman, Stephanie J.
Shah, Dylan S.
Landesberg, Melanie
Agrawala, Anjali
Kramer-Bottiglio, Rebecca
Robotics
To achieve real-world functionality, robots must have the ability to carry out decision-making computations. However, soft robots stretch and therefore need a solution other than rigid computers. Examples of embedding computing capacity into soft robots currently include appending rigid printed circuit boards (PCBs) to the robot, integrating soft logic gates, and exploiting material responses for material-embedded computation. Although promising, these approaches introduce limitations such as rigidity, tethers, or low logic gate density. The field of stretchable electronics has sought to solve these challenges, but a complete pipeline for direct integration of single-board computers, microcontrollers, and other complex circuitry into soft robots has remained elusive. We present a generalized method to translate any complex two-layer circuit into a soft, stretchable form. This enabled the creation of stretchable single-board microcontrollers (including Arduinos) and other commercial circuits (including Sparkfun circuits), without design simplifications. As demonstrations of the method's utility, we embed highly stretchable (>300% strain) Arduino Pro Minis into the bodies of multiple soft robots. This makes use of otherwise inert structural material, fulfilling the promise of the stretchable electronics field to integrate state-of-the-art computational power into robust, stretchable systems during active use.
title Stretchable Arduinos embedded in soft robots
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10333