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Robotic arms are essential to modern industries, however, their adaptability to unstructured environments remains limited. Soft robotic arms, particularly those actuated pneumatically, offer greater adaptability in unstructured environments…
Current upper limb prostheses aim to enhance user independence in daily activities by incorporating basic motor functions. However, they fall short of replicating the natural movement and interaction capabilities of the human arm. In…
Modern robots embody power and precision control. Yet, as robots undertake tasks that apply forces on humans, this power brings risk of injury. Soft robotic actuators use deformation to produce smooth, continuous motions and conform to…
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…
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…
Robots are increasingly being deployed not only in workplaces but also in households. Effectively execute of manipulation tasks by robots relies on variable impedance control with contact forces. Furthermore, robots should possess adaptive…
We prove that aerodynamic co-contraction in a redundant dual-rotor actuator can tune a passive, trim-defined aero-mechanical damping while keeping the commanded net force constant. In particular, we define an incremental damping coefficient…
Generally, humanoid robots usually suffer significant impact force when walking or running in a non-predefined environment that could easily damage the actuators due to high stiffness. In recent years, the usages of passive, compliant…
This paper explores the concept of external magnetic control for vine robots to enable their high curvature steering and navigation for use in endoluminal applications. Vine robots, inspired by natural growth and locomotion strategies,…
This paper presents an interaction control algorithm for a dielectric elastomer membrane actuator. The proposed method permits efficient exploitation of the controllable stiffness of the material, allowing to use the membrane as a…
The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…
Discrete-time joint acceleration constraints are widely used to enforce position and velocity limits. However, under voltage-constrained electric actuators, kinematically admissible accelerations may be physically unrealizable, exposing a…
Series Elastic Actuators provide many benefits in force control of robots in unconstrained environments. These benefits include high force fidelity, extremely low impedance, low friction, and good force control bandwidth. Series Elastic…
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
Achieving human-like dexterity in robotic grippers remains an open challenge, particularly in ensuring robust manipulation in uncertain environments. Soft robotic hands try to address this by leveraging passive compliance, a characteristic…
This paper proposes a new variable stiffness soft gripper that enables high-performance grasping tasks in industrial applications. The design of the proposed monolithic soft gripper includes a middle bellow and two side bellows (i.e.,…
This paper describes the control, and evaluation of a new human-scaled biped robot with liquid cooled viscoelastic actuators (VLCA). Based on the lessons learned from previous work from our team on VLCA [1], we present a new system design…
Without finger function, people with C5-7 spinal cord injury (SCI) regularly utilize wrist extension to passively close the fingers and thumb together for grasping. Wearable assistive grasping devices often focus on this familiar…
In human-robot systems, ensuring safety during force control in the presence of both internal and external disturbances is crucial. As a typical loosely coupled floating-base robot system, the supernumerary robotic leg (SRL) system is…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…