Design, Characterization, and Mechanical Programming of FabricReinforced Textile Actuators for a Soft Robotic Hand In this paper, we present the design, fabrication, and evaluation of robust, fabricreinforced textile actuators, which are capable of performing a variety and combination of motions, such as axial extension, radial expansion, bending, and twisting along its central axis. A simple fabrication procedure using a combination of lamination and sewing is described. The relationship between the fabric reinforcement characteristics and the actuator deformation is studied and experimentally verified. Multisegment actuators can be created by tailoring different sections of fabricreinforcements together in order to generate combination of motions to perform specific tasks. We demonstrate this by designing an anthropomorphic soft robotic hand and providing preliminary evaluations on grasping daily living objects of various size and shapes.

Design and Fabrication of Long SoftRobotic Elastomeric Actuator Inspired by Octopus Arm The biomimetic soft robotic actuators can provide stable flexible multipoint contact to safely grip delicate objects. A lot of soft robotic actuators have been fabricated using silica gel materials through molding methods. However, owing to the difficulty of the demolding process, existing soft robotic arms are often designed to be short. To fabricate a long soft robotic arm, this paper proposes a novel design approach for fabricating the long soft robotic arm (1000 mm) inspired by the octopus arm that is a fiberreinforced pneumatic elastomeric actuator. First, we develop a set of molds of the long soft robotic elastomeric actuator. To easily achieve the demolding of the soft actuator chamber, we design the three core petals around the mandrels in the molds. Furthermore, there are also two halfsegment mandrels. The two halfsegment mandrels are respectively removed from both ends of the mold when demolding. Then, we manufacture the long soft robotic arm using the molds by the combination silica gel and nonextensible materials. We also perform the experiments to verify the feasibility of the long soft robotic elastomeric actuator. The experimental results show the proposed design method for fabricating the long soft robotic arm is feasible.