Communications of the ACM
3D-Knitted Robots
The researchers demonstrated different knit robot prototypes, including gripper devices with bending and grasping appendages, a multi-chamber claw, an inchworm-like robot, and a snake-like actuator capable of picking up objects much heavier than itself.
Credit: Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Researchers at Harvard University, the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute (RI), the Rhode Island School of Design, the Parsons School of Design, and the Fashion Institute of Technology printed soft robots using three-dimensional (3D) knitting technology.
RI's James McCann helped develop software to automate the knitting process, which involved developing soft actuators to create a set of parametric patterns.
The researchers defined the patterns with knitting descriptions written in general-purpose coding languages, then composed code to run those descriptions on a knitting machine.
They tested 20 combinations of yarn, structure, and other factors to describe the effect of diverse knit architectures on folding and unfolding, structural geometry, and tensile properties, which were translated into robot prototypes.
From Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
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