The soft robotic hand is a hand attachment made to carry out simple everyday tasks such as picking up objects and writing for people with limited motor skills. By using a silicone gripper it allows the user to pick up more nonuniform objects with ease and allows for a soft and nonrigid attachment to the hand of the user. 

The soft robotic hand is composed of two silicone grippers. One that attaches to the hand and another one to pick up objects. The gripper closes when inflated and then opens when deflated. The gripper has three layers to it. The top layer which has the chambers for the air to flow through when the gripper is inflated, the middle layer is a non-stretchable fabric that forces the gripper to bend in only one direction, and the bottom layer is a thick layer of silicone to seal all the layers together so that there are no holes for air to escape from the chambers.

Flexi Bots are soft robots that can survive in harsh conditions, such as very high temperatures, impact, and crushing pressures.

Current soft robots use hard bodies with soft actuators leaving the robot vulnerable to cracking under impact. Rigid bodies are often needed to channel hydraulic lines to soft actuators, leaving delicate lines exposed. In our expirments, we found that complex hydraulic paths can be created using meltaway wax inserts and breakaway 3D printed parts. This project pushed boundaries of 3D printing, using the brittle characteristics of resin prints and engineered weak points to create mold inserts that remained in place as the silicone cured, but could be broken off after the fact.

Our soft robots, having no rigid parts, can be run over by a car, exposed to temperatures over 500°, and remain perfectly functional.

The exploration snake is used to explore new places that are impossible or improbable for humans to venture. Our project was designed and created to be able to imitate a snakes scales and to be able to recreate a snakes unusual movement. This required a lot of thought and inspiration, so we watched videos of snake movement, researched Harvard's inching snake and looked at different types of snake skin. Using this information we were able to recreate the snakes movement and scales. We tried multiple types of scales on different types of paper and we designed and 3d printed our own mold using fusion 360. Each scale was laser cut so that it was of perfect quality and each of our actuators were individually made. Through  all of our work we were able to find the ideal scale pattern and actuator. The actuator was able to bend two ways and the scales could provide friction one way but not the other. Yet each of these had it's own problems, The actuator was too tall and thin so we had trouble removing it from our molds and we didn't have a material that was flexible and strong enough for the scales. As a result our final prototype was only one section of the snake and the scales didn't provide enough friction to propel it completely forward. We can use what we learned here to create a better working prototype and to create a new method of exploration.