Related papers: Design of a Variable Stiffness Spring with Human-S…
Everting, soft growing vine robots benefit from reduced friction with their environment, which allows them to navigate challenging terrain. Vine robots can use air pouches attached to their sides for lateral steering. However, when all…
A large subset of the population suffers injury or disease that causes knee pain and difficulty navigating day-to-day tasks. Off-the-shelf knee orthoses that are commonly used to treat these ailments overlook user-specific joint geometry…
This paper presents the design of a mechanism to help people using mechanical orthoses to extend their legs easily and lock the knee joint of their orthosis. Many people living with spinal cord injury are living with paraplegia and thus…
We present a personal mobility device for lower-body impaired users through a light-weighted exoskeleton on wheels. On its core, a novel passive exoskeleton provides postural transition leveraging natural body postures with support to the…
We present the design of a new robotic human augmentation system that will assist the operator in carrying a heavy payload, reaching and maintaining difficult postures, and ultimately better performing their job. The Extra Robotic Legs…
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…
We analyze a simple problem in elasticity: the \emph{initial} motion of an elastic bar that after being hanged from an end is suddenly released. In a second problem a point mass is attached on the top of the bar. The analytical solutions…
The replication of object stiffness is essential for enhancing haptic feedback in virtual environments. However, existing research has overlooked how stylus stiffness influences the perception of virtual object stiffness during…
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…
Using lower-limbs exoskeletons provides potential advantages in terms of productivity and safety associated with reduced stress. However, complex issues in human-robot interaction are still open, such as the physiological effects of…
Tactile sensation is essential for humans to recognize objects. Various devices have been developed in the past for tactile presentation by electrostatic force, which are easy to configure devices, but there is currently no such device that…
Human locomotion involves continuously variable activities including walking, running, and stair climbing over a range of speeds and inclinations as well as sit-stand, walk-run, and walk-stairs transitions. Understanding the kinematics and…
Grasping deformable objects with varying stiffness remains a significant challenge in robotics. Estimating the local stiffness of a target object is important for determining an optimal grasp pose that enables stable pickup without damaging…
Learning is a physical process. Here, we aim to study a simple dynamical system composed of springs and sticks capable of arbitrarily approximating any continuous function. The main idea of our work is to use the sticks to mimic a…
New computational devices, in particular wearable devices, offer the unique property of always being available and thus to be able to constantly update the user with information, such as by notifications. While research has been done in…
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…
Partial-assistance exoskeletons hold significant potential for gait rehabilitation by promoting active participation during (re)learning of normative walking patterns. Typically, the control of interaction torques in partial-assistance…
Parallel-elastic joints can improve the efficiency and strength of robots by assisting the actuators with additional torques. For these benefits to be realized, a spring needs to be carefully designed. However, designing robots is an…
Ankle push-off largely contributes to limb energy generation in human walking, leading to smoother and more efficient locomotion. Providing this net positive work to an amputee requires an active prosthesis, but has the potential to enable…
Biped robots usually adopt feet with a rigid structure that simplifies walking on flat grounds and yet hinders ground adaptation in unstructured environments, thus jeopardizing stability. We recently explored in the SoftFoot the idea of…