A five-way directional soft valve with a case study: a starfish like soft robot

Abstract

Soft robots can adapt their shape to move through narrow gaps in ways a rigid robot cannot because of their compliance, but most of pneumatic and hydraulic soft robots are still relay on conventional hard valve and it hinder soft robots to completely achieve this. Here we describe a newly quake-typel five-way soft valve. This valve is only 47g and each way of the valve can be controlled individually. When vacuum is applied to the control chamber of the valve, the membranes will be pulled into control chamber and flow can be free to flow. To shape the complicated internal channels of the soft valve, a newly molding technique, which use soluble structure (PVA) as molding cores, was proposed. Compared with the previous soft valves, the soft valve can achieve more complicated function. A starfish-like soft robot was designed and manufactured to illustrate how the soft valve control its bending and stretching.