Related papers: A light-weight, multi-axis compliant tensegrity jo…
Under-actuated robot grippers as a pervasive tool of robots have become a considerable research focus. Despite their simplicity of mechanical design and control strategy, they suffer from poor versatility and weak adaptability, making…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position…
Tensegrity structures are becoming widely used in robotics, such as continuously bending soft manipulators and mobile robots to explore unknown and uneven environments dynamically. Estimating their shape, which is the foundation of their…
Grasp synergies represent a useful idea to reduce grasping complexity without compromising versatility. Synergies describe coordination patterns between joints, either in terms of position (joint angles) or effort (joint torques). In both…
Collaborative robotic systems will be a key enabling technology for current and future industrial applications. The main aspect of such applications is to guarantee safety for humans. To detect hazardous situations, current commercially…
Flexible joint robots, in particularly those which are equipped with harmonic-drive gears, can feature elasticities with hysteresis. Under heavy loads and large joint torques the hysteresis lost motion can lead to significant errors of…
Tails used as inertial appendages induce body rotations of animals and robots, a phenomenon that is governed largely by the ratio of the body and tail moments of inertia. However, vertebrate tails have more degrees of freedom (e.g., number…
Networks of rigid bars connected by joints, termed linkages, provide a minimal framework to design robotic arms and mechanical metamaterials built out of folding components. Here, we investigate a chain-like linkage that, according to…
Continuum robots, inspired by octopus arms and elephant trunks, combine dexterity with intrinsic compliance, making them well suited for unstructured and confined environments. Yet their continuously deformable morphology poses challenges…
This paper presents a new teleoperated spherical tensegrity robot capable of performing locomotion on steep inclined surfaces. With a novel control scheme centered around the simultaneous actuation of multiple cables, the robot demonstrates…
The field of physical human-robot interaction has dramatically evolved in the last decades. As a result, the robotic system's requirements have become more challenging, including personalized behavior for different tasks and users. Various…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Lightweight, controllable, and physically plausible human motion synthesis is crucial for animation, virtual reality, robotics, and human-computer interaction applications. Existing methods often compromise between computational efficiency,…
The compliant nature of soft wearable robots makes them ideal for complex multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) joints, but also introduce additional structural nonlinearities. Intuitive control of these wearable robots requires robust sensing…
This study presents a finite element analysis approach to non-linear and linearized tensegrity dynamics based on the Lagrangian method with nodal coordinate vectors as the generalized coordinates. In this paper, nonlinear tensegrity…
Spider monkeys (genus Ateles) have a prehensile tail that functions as a flexible, multipurpose fifth limb, enabling them to navigate complex terrains, grasp objects of various sizes, and swing between supports. Inspired by the spider…
This paper presents a novel framework for real-time human action recognition in industrial contexts, using standard 2D cameras. We introduce a complete pipeline for robust and real-time estimation of human joint kinematics, input to a…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid rods connected by elastic cables, have a number of unique properties that make them appealing for use as planetary exploration rovers. However, control of tensegrity robots remains a difficult problem…
Modulating the stiffness of soft actuators is crucial for improving the efficiency of interaction with the environment. However, current stiffness modulation mechanisms are hard to achieve high lateral stiffness and a wide range of bending…