An all soft, electro-pneumatic controller for soft robots

Abstract

Despite an ever increasing variety of soft sensors and actuators, there are few entirely soft robots that integrate both modalities into an autonomous system. Often, a minimum set of rigid components such as microcontrollers, are embedded into soft systems, compromising their flexibility. This has led to growing interest in entirely compliant versions of controllers for soft robots. In this work, we present the first integration of two such soft control systems: the soft, bistable valve and the soft matter computer. By combining them we allow information to pass from the pneumatic to the electrical domain, enabling control of electric soft actuators with pneumatic control signals. Our work is an important step towards the development of fully compliant robots and machines.