Printed helicoids with embedded air channels make sensorized segments for soft continuum robots

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have published a breakthrough in soft robotics fabrication, introducing a method to create sensorized, architected materials for large-scale systems. The team, led by Annan Zhang and Daniela Rus, solved a key challenge in soft robotics: integrating sensing into highly deformable, sparse structures like helicoid lattices. Their novel approach uses multi-material, vision-controlled jetting 3D printing to fabricate entire robot segments with embedded air channels in a single process, directly interfacing with printed circuit boards (PCBs) that house miniature pressure sensors and inertial measurement units (IMUs). This allows for distributed, real-time deformation sensing throughout the robot's body.

The technical core involves printing four distinct helicoid lattice designs, characterized for tunable stiffness and strength, with integrated pneumatic channels. This scalable fabrication strategy was validated by constructing a functional, meter-scale soft robotic arm with 14 degrees of freedom (DoF), driven by cables. The system successfully demonstrated open-loop trajectory tracking and object grasping. Crucially, the embedded sensors in the gripper enabled tactile-based stiffness detection, a critical capability for safe and adaptive interaction. This work, accepted for the 2026 IEEE RoboSoft conference, establishes a pathway to manufacturing large, intelligent soft robotic systems—like search-and-rescue manipulators or medical devices—that can sense their own shape and contact forces with unprecedented fidelity.