Rapid Prototyping Dynamic Robotic Fibers for Tunable Movement

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are promising shape-changing actuators for soft robotics in human–computer interaction (HCI). Current LCE manufacturing processes, such as fiber-drawing, extrusion, and 3D printing, face limitations on form-giving and accessibility. We introduce a novel rapid-prototyping approach for thermo-responsive LCE fiber actuators based on vacuum molding extrusion. Our contributions are threefold, a) a vacuum fiber molding (VFM) machine, b) LCE actuators with customizable fiber shapes c) open-source hackability of the machine. We build and test the VFM machine to generate shape-changing movements from four fiber actuators (pincer, curl, ribbon, and hook), and we look at how these new morphologies bridge towards soft robotic device integration.