Design and Characterization of a Pressure Controller Test Stand for Soft Pneumatic Actuator Testing

Abstract

Soft pneumatic actuator design has been of interest to the soft robotics community in recent years for their potential to expand the roles of robotics systems in human-interacting medical devices and delicate manufacturing processes. Unfortunately, it is difficult to analytically predict the degradation behavior over time of soft pneumatic actuators, and to compare such behavior in a repeatable manner between different actuator designs. To gather such degradation data experimentally, this thesis presents an open-source proportional-integralcontrol (PID) control test stand system with only off-the-shelf components, in order to create a tool for standardized and repeatable characterization testing of soft pneumatic actuator life-cycle behavior. The system is open-source and modular, allowing researchers in the MIT Fabrication-Integrated Design Lab (FIDL) as well as other soft robotics researchers to customize the program and associated hardware as necessary for their own soft pneumatic actuator research inquiries. This thesis explores the design of both the hardware and software of this test stand system, which is informed by the system’s functional requirements, and additionally explores the PID controller’s capabilities and limitations.