Joint and link overmoulding
Silicone bonded directly onto a metal or plastic skeleton to absorb impact and hide the joint gap. The interface is the risk: once it delaminates, good looks count for nothing.
Robot silicone parts: skin, joints and buffers
Joint overmoulding, biomimetic skins and buffer seals: here silicone is not a sealant but controlled softness — it has to conform, recover, and still look right after repeated bending and rubbing. This page covers how the structure is fixed and which parameters have to be settled before tooling.
What we mould
Three part types, three load cases
Biomimetic skin
Full or segmented coverage that reads like skin. The difficulty is conforming to compound curvature, seam treatment and local thinning — uneven wall shows up directly as wrinkling.
Buffers and cable seals
Corner, cable-exit and moving-part buffers that combine pinch protection with dust sealing, often moulded with the structural part to cut assembly steps.
Specification
Four dimensions, and then a quote means something
Robot parts rarely fail because the material is wrong; they fail because hardness, wall and load direction do not match. Values below are confirmed against drawings and test pieces — we do not assume them.
| Dimension | What it drives | How it is fixed |
|---|---|---|
| Hardness and wall | Feel, tear resistance, recovery after bending | Test pieces matched to joint travel and intended grip |
| Coverage method | Overmoulded (fixed to the skeleton) or sleeve (replaceable) | Follows the service strategy: replaceable parts favour sleeves |
| Sensor windows | Camera, microphone, touch and cooling cut-outs or local thinning | Positions and tolerances agreed before tooling |
| Cleaning and wear | Whitening or tackiness after wiping and alcohol disinfection | Grade chosen by cleaning frequency, verified by rub test |
Sampling
Prove the feel at tens of parts, then cut steel
Most AI hardware starts small: simple or segmented tooling to prove shape and feel, then production tooling. Tooling and sampling are quoted separately — see sampling and tooling rules. Failures cluster in four places: wrinkling on curvature, delamination, local hardness, whitening after wiping. The first three are structural; the last is material and surface finish.
Send the joint structure or the skin model
We reply with a coverage method and hardness recommendation, then say whether tooling is needed and how many sampling rounds.