Related papers: Development of a Tendon Driven Variable Stiffness …
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
This paper presents a novel, modular, cable-driven soft robotic arm featuring multi-segment reconfigurability. The proposed architecture enables a stackable system with independent segment control, allowing scalable adaptation to diverse…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
Organisms in nature, such as Cephalopods and Pachyderms, exploit stiffness modulation to achieve amazing dexterity in the control of their appendages. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of layer jamming, which is a popular stiffness…
Continuum robots with variable compliance have gained significant attention due to their adaptability in unstructured environments. Among various stiffness modulation techniques, layer jamming (LJ) provides a simple yet effective approach…
Follow-the-leader (FTL) motion is essential for continuum robots operating in fragile and confined environments. It allows the robot to exert minimal force on its surroundings, reducing the risk of damage. This paper presents a novel design…
Fibre jamming is a relatively new and understudied soft robotic mechanism that has previously found success when used in stiffness-tuneable arms and fingers. However, to date researchers have not fully taken advantage of the freedom offered…
Inflated continuum robots are promising for a variety of navigation tasks, but controlling their motion with a small number of actuators is challenging. These inflated beam robots tend to buckle under compressive loads, producing extremely…
Active control of the shape of soft robots is challenging. Despite having an infinite number of passive degrees of freedom (DOFs), soft robots typically only have a few actively controllable DOFs, limited by the number of degrees of…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…
Continuum robots have gained widespread popularity due to their inherent compliance and flexibility, particularly their adjustable levels of stiffness for various application scenarios. Despite efforts to dynamic modeling and control…
Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…
Achieving human-like dexterity in robotic grippers remains an open challenge, particularly in ensuring robust manipulation in uncertain environments. Soft robotic hands try to address this by leveraging passive compliance, a characteristic…
This paper presents the design, modeling, and fabrication of 3D-printed, tendon-actuated continuum robots featuring a flexible, tapered backbone constructed from thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). Our scalable design incorporates an…
Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…
To design a general-purpose assembly robot system that can handle objects of various shapes, we propose a soft jig that fits to the shapes of assembly parts. The functionality of the soft jig is based on a jamming gripper developed in the…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
This paper introduces a novel variable stiffness mechanism termed Helically Wound Structured Electrostatic Layer Jamming (HWS-ELJ) and systematically investigates its potential applications in variable stiffness robotic finger design. The…