The Soft Compiler: A Web-Based Tool for the Design of Modular Pneumatic Circuits for Soft Robots
This tool addresses inefficiencies in soft robot circuit design for researchers and engineers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing soft logic gate concepts.
The authors tackled the challenge of designing and implementing modular pneumatic circuits for soft robots by developing a web-based graphical user interface called the Soft Compiler, which generates mathematically optimized circuit diagrams from user-defined behaviors, reducing a circuit from 11 to 4 logic gates while maintaining functionality.
Developing soft circuits from individual soft logic gates poses a unique challenge: with increasing numbers of logic gates, the design and implementation of circuits leads to inefficiencies due to mathematically unoptimized circuits and wiring mistakes during assembly. It is therefore practically important to introduce design tools that support the development of soft circuits. We developed a web-based graphical user interface, the Soft Compiler, that accepts a user-defined robot behavior as a truth table to generate a mathematically optimized circuit diagram that guides the assembly of a soft fluidic circuit. We describe the design and experimental verification of three soft circuits of increasing complexity, using the Soft Compiler as a design tool and a novel pneumatic glove as an input interface. In one example, we reduce the size of a soft circuit from the original 11 logic gates to 4 logic gates while maintaining circuit functionality. The Soft Compiler is a web-based design tool for fluidic, soft circuits and published under open-source MIT License.