Design and Testing of 2-Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) Printable Pneumatic Soft Finger

Recently, soft robotics have been rapidly developed. Different from the traditional robots, soft robots have the advantages of higher flexibility, safer operations, lightweight, low manufacturing cost, simple fabrication, etc. Soft robots have been applied to various applications, such as medical devices, grippers, rehabilitation devices, etc. This paper proposes a printable pneumatic soft finger with two degrees of freedom (DOF). The developed finger is capable of not only bending but also twisting. A vision-based experimental setup was used to observe and measure the complex actuations with respect to two characteristic variables in the soft finger design. Kriging was used to build the response surfaces of total movement and twisting angle of the soft finger. The built Kriging models could help designers or engineers understand how each variable affects the complex actuations of the proposed printable pneumatic soft finger.