A digital light processing 3D printer for fast and high-precision fabrication of soft pneumatic actuators

In this paper, we built up a desktop digital light processing (DLP) 3D printer and fabricated multiple size soft pneumatic actuators integrally with fast speed and high precision. The printing process is based on the projection microstereolithography method. The composition of the printing system and key parameters during the printing process were presented. Evaluation experiments demonstrate that our printer can print objects with as small as 87.5 μm size features. We first printed single pneumatic net-works (pneu-net) actuators integrally and conducted a series of actuation experiments and finite element method analyses to test the actuators’ deformation capability. We further designed a soft pneumatic gripper containing three micro pneu-net actuators with 0.4 mm wide square air channels as well as 0.2 mm thick chamber walls and fabricated the gripper integrally in less than 30 min using our printer. The grasping capability of the gripper was verified through experiments as well. Results presented in this work prove the performance of the DLP printer we build up and show the convenience of fabricating micro soft pneumatic actuators integrally using DLP 3D printing approach with fast speed and high precision.