SoRoForge: A Computational Design Tool for Soft Robots
Notice any differences between these two hexapod walker designs? One was created in a traditional CAD software. The other was created in a software platform that I wrote over three years as part of my PhD research.
Why did I go through this development to create a very similar looking hexapod? Because existing design, simulation, and fabrication workflows do not serve us in the exploration of complex, nonlinear design spaces.
What’s a soft robot?
Simply put, it’s a robotic system composed of soft, compliant materials. Soft robots outperform traditional rigid counterparts in handling fragile objects and tolerating large disturbances from their environments.
It turns out their also a perfect example of the shortcomings of our traditional design practices. Soft structures are governed by non-intuitive mechanics, are challenging to simulate, are fabricated differently than traditional low-DOF mechanical systems, and are ill-represented by traditional component/subassy/assy hierarchies.
As a result, soft robot design requires the development of multi-domain expertise (e.g. advanced computer-aided design , nonlinear simulation, and advanced fabrication) - an expensive process! Enter SoRoForge - my open-source design tool which uses implicit geometry modeling, automatic execution of nonlinear FEA simulations, and 3D printing to rethink our design practices.
How does it work?
Instead of relying on familiar but ultimately fragile CAD representations for complex 3D designs, I invoke computational network representations of implicit geometry functions to describe robot shapes.
The core representations of designs in the SoRoForge are fundamentally different from NURBS in three ways:
volumetric and stable as opposed to surface-based and fragile
accessible to human and artificial design intelligence
intimately linked spatial discretizations used for simulation
This image shows a soft robot (a bending pneumatic finger) at multiple stages in the SoRoForge design, simulation and fabrication process:
This is a big topic.
Creating a design tool of this scale requires significant development and synthesis efforts. Learn more about component pieces of the tool an how they interact:
