Easier ways to manufacture soft robots! These single skin designs have a lot of potential. I think that making robots this way could lower their cost while increasing their strength and durability. I’ve been calling these single skin robots plionics.

The method consists of designing your robot in CAD and working backwards from there to produce an outer mold and an inner core. Casting silicone between the mold and the core forms the robot itself and melting out the core gives you the finished product. In this tutorial I’m going to demonstrate how to put together one of my most successful robot designs (a strange squishy creature called the Trefoil Tentacle) using a combination of 3d printing, silicone casting, an arduino, and a bit of pneumatics.