Related papers: Design Paradigms Based on Spring Agonists for Unde…
Tendon-driven anthropomorphic robotic hands often lack direct joint angle sensing, as the integration of joint encoders can compromise mechanical compactness and dexterity. This paper presents a computational method for estimating joint…
Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…
Prosthesis users can regain partial limb functionality, however, full natural limb mobility is rarely restored, often resulting in compensatory movements that lead to discomfort, inefficiency, and long-term physical strain. To address this…
Legged locomotion shows promise for running in complex, unstructured environments. Designing such legged robots requires considering heterogeneous, multi-domain constraints and variables, from mechanical hardware and geometry choices to…
The objective of this paper is to distill the following essential idea from the RSS 2016 Workshop on Minimality and Design Automation and the RSS 2017 Workshop on Minimality and Trade-offs in Automated Robot Design: The information…
While much work has been done recently in the realm of model-based control of soft robots and soft-rigid hybrids, most works examine robots that have an inherently serial structure. While these systems have been prevalent in the literature,…
Springs can provide force at zero net energy cost by recycling negative mechanical work to benefit motor-driven robots or spring-augmented humans. However, humans have limited force and range of motion, and motors have a limited ability to…
When humans physically interact with robots, we need the robots to be both safe and performant. Series elastic actuators (SEAs) fundamentally advance safety by introducing compliant actuation. On the one hand, adding a spring mitigates the…
Flexible robotics are capable of achieving various functionalities by shape morphing, benefiting from their compliant bodies and reconfigurable structures. Here we construct and study a class of origami springs generalized from the known…
Robots will become ubiquitously useful only when they can use few attempts to teach themselves to perform different tasks, even with complex bodies and in dynamical environments. Vertebrates, in fact, successfully use trial-and-error to…
The paper focuses on the stiffness modeling of robotic manipulators with gravity compensators. The main attention is paid to the development of the stiffness model of a spring-based compensator located between sequential links of a serial…
Identifying the parameters of robotic systems, such as motor inertia or joint friction, is critical to satisfactory controller synthesis, model analysis, and observer design. Conventional identification techniques are designed primarily for…
Using results on the topology of moduli space of polygons [Jaggi, 92; Kapovich and Millson, 94], it can be shown that for a planar robot arm with $n$ segments there are some values of the base-length, $z$, at which the configuration space…
As soft robot design matures, researchers have converged to sophisticated design paradigms to enable the development of more suitable platforms. Two such paradigms are soft-rigid hybrid robots, which utilize rigid structural materials in…
Athletic robots demand a whole-body actuation system design that utilizes motors up to the boundaries of their performance. However, creating such robots poses challenges of integrating design principles and reasoning of practical design…
This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the…
Energy efficiency is critical to the success of legged robotics. Efficiency is lost through wasted energy during locomotion and standing. Including elastic elements has been shown to reduce movement costs, while including breaks can reduce…
We present an approach to overcoming challenges in dynamical dexterity for robots through tunable origami structures. Our work leverages a one-parameter family of flat sheet crease patterns that folds into origami bellows, whose axial…
Humanoid robots toward human-level dexterity require robotic hands capable of simultaneously providing high grasping force, rapid actuation speeds, multiple degrees of freedom, and lightweight structures within human-like size constraints.…
Robotic Hopping is challenging from the perspective of both modeling the dynamics as well as the mechanical design due to the short period of ground contact in which to actuate on the world. Previous work has demonstrated stable hopping on…