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Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
The ability to adapt and conform to angular and uneven surfaces improves the suction cup's performance in grasping and manipulation. However, in most cases, the adaptation costs lack of required stiffness for manipulation after surface…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
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…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
A bio-inspired, passively deployable flap attached to an airfoil by a torsional spring of fixed stiffness can provide significant lift improvements at post-stall angles of attack. In this work, we describe a hybrid active-passive variant to…
Magnetic soft continuum robots are capable of bending with remote control in confined space environments, and they have been applied in various bioengineering contexts. As one type of ferromagnetic soft continuums, the Magnetically Induced…
Digital stiffness programmability is fulfilled with a heterogeneous mechanical metamaterial. The prototype consists of an elastomer matrix containing tessellations of diamond shaped cavities selectively confined with semi-rigid plastic beam…
Reprogrammable mechanical metamaterials, composed of a lattice of discretely adaptive elements, are emerging as a promising platform for mechanical intelligence. To operate in unknown environments, such structures must go beyond passive…
Dynamical systems (DSs) provide a framework for high flexibility, robustness, and control reliability and are widely used in motion planning and physical human-robot interaction. The properties of the DS directly determine the robot's…
Shared Control methods often use impedance control to track target poses in a robotic manipulator. The guidance behavior of such controllers is shaped by the used stiffness gains, which can be varying over time to achieve an adaptive…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
Based on the idea of variable stiffness mechanisms, a variety of such mechanisms is shown in this work. Specifically, 2-DOF parallel kinematic machines equipped with redundant actuators and non-linear springs in the actuated joints are…
Semi-active vibration reduction techniques are defined as techniques in which controlled actions do not operate directly on the system's degrees of freedom (as in the case of active vibration control) but on the system's parameters, i.e.,…
Elastic metamaterials are often designed for a single permanent function. We explore the possibility of altering a material's function repeatedly through a self-organization, "training" process, controlled by applied strains. We show that…
A numerical study on the elastic response of single- and multi-layer systems formed by alternating pentamode lattices and stiffening plates is presented. Finite element simulations are conducted to analyze the dependence of the effective…
Variable impedance control is advantageous for physical human-robot interaction to improve safety, adaptability and many other aspects. This paper presents a gain-scheduled variable stiffness control approach under strict frequency-domain…
Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
This paper presents a new stiffness modulation mechanism that enables infinite-range stiffness modulation in a fast manner. The proposed stiffness modulation mechanism can help improve many robot environment interaction applications such as…
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…