Final Project

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Concept Inspiration – The Origin of My Soft Robot Design

For my Fab Academy final project, I am designing a soft robotic facehugger, inspired by the biomechanical creatures from the Alien franchise. The facehugger's ability to crawl, grasp, and jump makes it an ideal reference for a multi-functional soft robot that explores the possibilities of bio-inspired locomotion and soft material actuation.

Why a Soft Robotic Facehugger?

Soft robotics is a rapidly growing field that emphasizes flexibility, adaptability, and safety compared to traditional rigid robots. The facehugger's movements in the film—crawling on the ground, leaping onto a target, and wrapping around it—mirror real-world applications of soft robots, such as:

Bio-inspired locomotion – mimicking how biological organisms move using soft, deformable structures.
Soft grasping mechanisms – enabling robots to handle delicate or irregularly shaped objects.
Dynamic jumping & climbing – expanding soft robot applications beyond simple crawling.

Key Features of My Design

To replicate the iconic facehugger movements, my soft robot will feature:

Pneumatic actuation – Using air pressure to control multiple soft limbs for locomotion and grasping.
Multi-chambered silicone limbs – Inspired by octopus tentacles, allowing independent movement of each leg.
Central jumping mechanism – A large air bladder at the center to enable rapid expansion for a jumping motion.
3D-printed molds + silicone casting – Fabricating the flexible structure using digital fabrication techniques.

This project not only explores biomimetic movement in soft robots but also serves as a testbed for pneumatic control, multi-material fabrication, and embedded sensing. By integrating principles from nature, film-inspired design, and modern soft robotics research, I aim to create a visually striking and functionally dynamic robotic creature.

Design Concept

The soft robot design emulates the multi-degree-of-freedom movements of the facehugger from the movie Alien, including crawling, grasping, and jumping. To achieve these actions, multiple flexible "leg" actuators can be arranged in a radial configuration. Each leg is made of silicone material and contains inflatable pneumatic chambers. By independently controlling the inflation and deflation of each leg, different gaits can be achieved: alternating inflation of the left and right legs enables crawling, simultaneous inflation of all legs facilitates jumping, and selective inflation allows the legs to bend and wrap around objects for grasping and attachment. Each flexible leg requires multi-degree-of-freedom bending capabilities to mimic the agility of biological limbs, which is typically realized through a multi-chamber pneumatic network design. Walking / Crawling Soft Robot This pneumatic network (PneuNets) actuator consists of a series of interconnected air chambers that expand when inflated, generating bending or twisting deformations. This mechanism grants the soft robot complex motion capabilities.

Reference images

While researching, I came across the soft robotics achievements of Harvard University's Wyss InstituteMultigait soft robot. They developed a quadrupedal soft robot that uses flexible silicone legs and a simple pneumatic valve control system. Remarkably, it achieved multiple gaits and could crawl and overcome obstacles using only five pneumatic actuators, even without sensors.

Inspired by this, I can adopt a similar multi-legged layout but increase the number of legs to replicate the facehugger's wrapping motion. The arrangement and length of the legs will be optimized so that the robot can lie flat on the ground for rapid crawling and extend its legs to grasp onto a target surface after jumping. Structurally, the robot’s central body can be designed as a flat, flexible sheet connecting all the soft legs. This sheet can also serve as an additional pneumatic actuation chamber, providing the necessary upward thrust for jumping.