Flexible Rigid Coupling Soft Pneumatic Actuators with Customizable Shape

By designing and manufacturing different internal air chambers, soft pneumatic actuators can achieve a variety of movements, such as bending, twisting, and stretching. The flexibility of actuators can be improved by designing shape-customizable pneumatic actuators. In this paper, we propose a programmable design that enables mechanical programming and shape customization of pneumatic actuators by flexibly and selectively placing rigid constraint structures. Specifically, the shape-customizable soft actuator designed in this paper consists of a bending soft actuator and a rigid constraint structure. Under the coupling effect of the rigid-flexible structure, some areas of the soft actuator are constrained and cannot be bent, while other areas can bend. Through the constraint effect of the rigid constraint structure on the deformation of the soft actuator, the customization of the shape of the soft actuator after deformation is realized. In addition, we also studied the influence of the size of the rigid constraint structure on the deformation results of the actuator. The shape-programmable soft pneumatic actuators can be used in application scenarios with specific requirements on the shape of the actuator.