Related papers: Towards One-Dollar Robots: An Integrated Design an…

This article describes an exemplary robot exercise which was conducted in a class for mechatronics students. The goal of this exercise was to engage students in scientific thinking and reasoning, activities which do not always play an…

Modular robots can be reconfigured to create a variety of designs from a small set of components. But constructing a robot's hardware on its own is not enough -- each robot needs a controller. One could create controllers for some designs…

Trajectory generation in confined environment is crucial for wide adoption of intelligent robot manipulators. In this paper, we propose a novel motion planning approach for redundant robot arms that uses a hybrid optimization framework to…

Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…

Robotic surgery represents a major breakthrough in medical interventions, which has revolutionized surgical procedures. However, the high cost and limited accessibility of robotic surgery systems pose significant challenges for training…

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 presents the concept of an In situ Fabricator, a mobile robot intended for on-site manufacturing, assembly and digital fabrication. We present an overview of a prototype system, its capabilities, and highlight the importance of…

This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…

Dexterous object manipulation remains an open problem in robotics, despite the rapid progress in machine learning during the past decade. We argue that a hindrance is the high cost of experimentation on real systems, in terms of both time…

This paper introduces a cube-based reconfigurable robot that utilizes an electromagnet-based actuation framework to reconfigure in three dimensions via pivoting. While a variety of actuation mechanisms for self-reconfigurable robots have…

Developing soft circuits from individual soft logic gates poses a unique challenge: with increasing numbers of logic gates, the design and implementation of circuits leads to inefficiencies due to mathematically unoptimized circuits and…

Electrostatic actuators provide a promising approach to creating soft robotic sheets, due to their flexible form factor, modular integration, and fast response speed. However, their control requires kilo-Volt signals and understanding of…

Although digital fabrication processes at the desktop scale have become proficient and prolific, systems aimed at producing larger-scale structures are still typically complex, expensive, and unreliable. In this work, we present an approach…

Mechanics and electronic systems can be applied to the physical models to understand the physical phenomena for students in laboratory. In this paper we have developed a robot arm for a laboratory experiment, where students learn how to…

Robot imitation learning is often hindered by the high cost of collecting large-scale, real-world data. This challenge is especially significant for low-cost robots designed for home use, as they must be both user-friendly and affordable.…

General-purpose robots should possess human-like dexterity and agility to perform tasks with the same versatility as us. A human-like form factor further enables the use of vast datasets of human-hand interactions. However, the primary…

To achieve real-world functionality, robots must have the ability to carry out decision-making computations. However, soft robots stretch and therefore need a solution other than rigid computers. Examples of embedding computing capacity…

Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space…

Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…

Fast and safe manipulation of flexible objects with a robot manipulator necessitates measures to cope with vibrations. Existing approaches either increase the task execution time or require complex models and/or additional instrumentation…