A Toolbox for Designing 3D-Printing-Ready Pneumatic Circuits for Controlling Soft Robots

The robotics field has witnessed a rapid increase in the popularity of soft pneumatic robots due to their adaptability to unstructured environments and safe human-robot interaction. However, many of them are still controlled by rigid solenoid valves and microcontrollers. Recent research works have introduced various electronics-free computational devices for soft robotic applications. Yet, connecting these individual components into pneumatic circuits still remains challenging. The manual circuit design, fabrication, and piping process can bring inefficient circuit layout, redundant tubing, unreliable fittings, and potentially human mistakes. This work presents an open-source toolbox for automatically designing pneumatic circuits for soft robotic applications. The toolbox takes the desired computation function along with some space constraints as inputs, and generates a 3D-printable file of a pneumatic circuit that can be fabricated and used directly. This is achieved by efficiently positioning the logic gates and air channels while considering the workspace constraints, fabrication limits, material cost, and system complexity. The versatility of the design automation algorithm has been tested with two different truth tables and six different workspaces. The work also showcases utilizing the toolbox to design a computational circuit that governs the movements of a soft robotic hand with four pneumatic actuators.