3D printed digital pneumatic logic for the control of soft robotic actuators

Soft robots are paving their way to catch up with the application range of metal-based machines and to occupy fields which are challenging for traditional machines. Pneumatic actuators play an important role in this development, allowing the construction of bioinspired motion systems. Pneumatic logic gates provide a powerful alternative for controlling pressure-activated soft robots, which are often controlled by metallic valves and electric circuits. Many existing approaches for fully compliant pneumatic control logic suffer from high manual effort and low pressure tolerance. In our work, we invented 3D printable, pneumatic logic gates that perform Boolean operations and imitate electric circuits. Within 7 hours, an FDM printer is able to produce a module that serves as either an OR, AND or NOT gate; the logic function is defined by the assigned input signals. The gate contains two alternately acting pneumatic valves, whose work principle is based on the interaction of pressurized cham..., The described pneumatic elements were fabricated on a 3D printing platform as detailed in Conrad et al. (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64313-3_6). The flexible parts, like valves and logic gates, described in this work have been printed in one continuous process with “Recreus FilaFlex TPU A60” (shore hardness A 63), “Recreus FilaFlex TPU A70”  and “Recreus FilaFlex TPU A82” with fitting print parameters (please see supplements).
In all pneumatic experiments, the pressurization of chambers and channels was controlled by a custom test stand. This setup contained six pneumatic proportional valves driven by a LabView program. The software supports the creation of linear patterns and repeating sequences, which simplified the systematic characterization by applying rising and falling pressure ramps to the logic elements. For the characterization of a single valve, unused inlets were sealed and the gate output socket was connected to atmospheric pressure via a flow sensor to measure the vo..., , # 3D printed digital pneumatic logic for the control of soft robotic actuators

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jq2bvq8gv ](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jq2bvq8gv)

This dataset contains the data and scripts that were used to generate the figures of the main text and supplements. All data was generated with pneumatic elements that were fabricated on a 3D printing platform as detailed in Conrad et al. (2020) (). The flexible parts, like valves and logic gates, described in this work have been printed in one continuous process with 'Recreus FilaFlex TPU A60' (shore hardness A 63), 'Recreus FilaFlex TPU A70' and 'Recreus FilaFlex TPU A82' with fitting print parameters (detailed in the supplements). This includes pneumatic connectors, channels and expandable membranes. Most parameters were set in the software 'PrusaSlic3r 2.4', which was used to prepare our models for printing. In a post processing step the files generated by the software were additionally modified to adapt the flow rate to...