Soft inflatable actuators show several advantages in flexible and versatile behaviors. Comparing to traditional silicon based soft actuators, fabric-based counterpart shows outstanding benefit such as lightweight and stowable. However, there are lots of challenges on design fabric-based structure, due to the joining/bonding constrain, incompressible membrane structure behavior of the fabric material, and non-existing design and simulation platform. This paper presents a pipeline from design, simulation, and fabrication of a hand shape air morphing structure for optimized performance based on the parametric analysis to check the effect of inflation pressure, geometry of bonding line, stiffness of skin fabric and rigid bar element integration to the inflatable structure. A demo of the optimized sample was fabricated and compared with the optimized design. Such lab scale study shines a light for design and analysis of large-scale structure membrane structure with morphing functionality.
Abstract Soft inflatable actuators show several advantages in flexible and versatile behaviors. Comparing to traditional silicon based soft actuators, fabric-based counterpart shows [...]
Parametric design and optimization of hand shape air morphing structure and its test validation 
