Decision-making based on environmental cues is a crucial feature of autonomous systems. Embodying this feature in soft robots poses nontrivial challenges on both hardware and software that can undermine the simplicity and autonomy of such devices. Existing pneumatic electronics-free soft robots have so far mostly been approached by using system fluidic circuit architectures analogous to digital electronics. Instead, here we design dedicated pneumatic coding blocks equivalent to If , If...break , and For software control statements, which are based on the analog nature of nonlinear mechanical components. We demonstrate that we can combine these coding blocks into programs to implement sequences and to control an electronics-free autonomous soft gripper that switches between behaviors based on interactions with the environment. As such, our strategy provides an alternative approach to designing complex behavior in soft robotics that is more reminiscent of how functionalities are also encoded in the body of living systems.

中文翻译：

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气动编码块可实现无电子流体软机器人的可编程性


基于环境线索的决策是自主系统的一个关键特征。在软体机器人中体现这一功能对硬件和软件都提出了不小的挑战，这可能会破坏此类设备的简单性和自主性。到目前为止，现有的无气动电子软体机器人大多是通过使用类似于数字电子的系统流体电路架构来实现的。相反，我们在这里设计了等效于 If 、 If...break 和 For 软件控制语句，这些语句基于非线性机械组件的模拟性质。我们证明，我们可以将这些编码块组合成程序来实现序列并控制一个无电子的自主软抓手，该抓手根据与环境的交互在行为之间切换。因此，我们的策略提供了一种在软机器人中设计复杂行为的替代方法，该方法更让人想起功能在生命系统中的编码方式。