Soft Robot Pressure Control Box (2022)

Motivation:

I was told by my research PI to build this box to be able to turn robot pressure on and off as well as hold pressure in grippers.

Description:

I used solid works to design the box and purchased the parts based off of an old system. The box is designed to take in high wall pressure and drop it down to a workable value for the robot. The robot in the video is Qifan Yu’s.

Lessons Learned:

I spent an hour getting the laser kerf correct to press fit the box together, but then the press fit didn’t work after cutting (I think because of laser drift or maybe the mirror needed cleaning), which was very sad. I used glue instead. It also messed up on the press fits for the dials, so I then had to clean all of those holes up with a file. I spent the extra $10 to get the little 3M bumpons (rubber feet) for the box, which makes it like x10 nicer to use since it isn’t always sliding everywhere. Stiff tubing is much harder to work with than flexible tubing for barbed fittings. Also, plastic fittings still need teflon tape like brass fittings.