Auto‐Routing Fluidic Printed Circuit Boards

Abstract

Advances in additive manufacturing have streamlined the fabrication of pneumatically actuated soft robotic components, including actuators, logic gates, and robot bodies. However, interconnecting these components with tubing remains a key bottleneck. Manual routing is labor‐intensive, is error‐prone, and limits scalability. We present STREAM, an automated design tool that enables users to assign connection ports and generate tubing routes automatically between components. A modified A * algorithm computes efficient paths, and a modeling algorithm produces a 3D‐printable fluidic circuit board (FCB). We demonstrate the capabilities of STREAM by generating fluidic circuit boards for a soft hexapod robot with 6 logic gates and 72 connections, a variable‐frequency ring oscillator with 6 logic gates and 60 connections, and a full adder with 9 logic gates and 96 connections. This plug‐and‐play tool enables the rapid and reliable creation of complex fluidic circuits by eliminating manual design and assembly and is released as an extension for Blender, the open‐source 3D graphics software. STREAM is broadly applicable to any system involving fluidic channel networks such as lab‐on‐a‐chip devices, microfluidic platforms, or biohybrid systems.