Related papers: Task-Specific Design Optimization and Fabrication …
Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings. In this…
Cloth manipulation is a category of deformable object manipulation of great interest to the robotics community, from applications of automated laundry-folding and home organizing and cleaning to textiles and flexible manufacturing. Despite…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Soft robots have drawn significant attention recently for their ability to achieve rich shapes when interacting with complex environments. However, their elasticity and flexibility compared to rigid robots also pose significant challenges…
Balancing parallel robots throughout their workspace while avoiding the use of balancing masses and respecting design practicality constraints is difficult. Medical robots demand such compact and lightweight designs. This paper considers…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
Purpose-This paper is based on design of a quadruped robot and manufacturing it with 3-D printer followed by its detailed analysis. It focuses on the advantages of additive manufacturing rather than conventional manufacturing techniques and…
Tendon-driven mechanisms are useful from the perspectives of variable stiffness, redundant actuation, and lightweight design, and they are widely used, particularly in hands, wrists, and waists of robots. The design of these wire…
Wearable devices like exoskeletons are designed to reduce excessive loads on specific joints of the body. Specifically, single- or two-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) upper-body industrial exoskeletons typically focus on compensating for the…
The design and fabrication of soft robot hands is still a time-consuming and difficult process. Advances in rapid prototyping have accelerated the fabrication process significantly while introducing new complexities into the design process.…
The advent of 3D printing has revolutionized many industries and has had similar improvements for soft robots. However, many challenges persist for these functional devices. Magnetic soft robots require the addition of magnetic particles…
Soft robots are promising for manipulation tasks thanks to their compliance, safety, and high degree of freedom. However, the commonly used bidirectional continuum segment design means soft robotic manipulators only function in a limited…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
In spite of recent progress, soft robotics still suffers from a lack of unified modeling framework. Nowadays, the most adopted model for the design and control of soft robots is the piece-wise constant curvature model, with its consolidated…
Modular robots can be tailored to achieve specific tasks and rearranged to achieve previously infeasible ones. The challenge is choosing an appropriate design from a large search space. In this work, we describe a framework that…
This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling an on-orbit assembly mission scenario of a large flexible structure using a multi-arm robot. This methodology accounts for significant changes in inertia and flexibility…
Smart factories that allow flexible production of highly individualized goods require flexible robots, usable in efficient assembly lines. Compliant robots can work safely in shared environments with domain experts, who have to program such…
Underactuated manipulators reduce the number of bulky motors, thereby enabling compact and mechanically robust designs. However, fewer actuators than joints means that the manipulator can only access a specific manifold within the joint…
We automate soft robotic hand design iteration by co-optimizing design and control policy for dexterous manipulation skills in simulation. Our design iteration pipeline combines genetic algorithms and policy transfer to learn control…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…