Design and Control of Foam Hands for Dexterous Manipulation

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 1950033
Author(s):  
Dominik Bauer ◽  
Cornelia Bauer ◽  
Jonathan P. King ◽  
Daniele Moro ◽  
Kai-Hung Chang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Design Optimization ◽  
Robot Design ◽  
Soft Robot ◽  
Dexterous Manipulation ◽  
Soft Robots ◽  
Manufacturing Control ◽  
Great Progress ◽  
Robot Hands ◽  
High Competence ◽  
And Control

There has been great progress in soft robot design, manufacture, and control in recent years, and soft robots are a tool of choice for safe and robust handling of objects in conditions of uncertainty. Still, dexterous in-hand manipulation using soft robots remains a challenge. This paper introduces foam robot hands actuated by tendons sewn through a fabric glove. The flexibility of tendon actuation allows for high competence in utilizing deformation for robust in-hand manipulation. We discuss manufacturing, control, and design optimization for foam robots and demonstrate robust grasping and in-hand manipulation on a variety of different physical hand prototypes.

scholarly journals Soft Robotics: Biological Inspiration, State of the Art, and Future Research

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepak Trivedi ◽  
Christopher D. Rahn ◽  
William M. Kier ◽  
Ian D. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Robot Design ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Soft Robots ◽  
Biological Inspiration ◽  
End Effectors ◽  
And Control ◽  
Complex Movement

Traditional robots have rigid underlying structures that limit their ability to interact with their environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators have rigid links and can manipulate objects using only their specialised end effectors. These robots often encounter difficulties operating in unstructured and highly congested environments. A variety of animals and plants exhibit complex movement with soft structures devoid of rigid components. Muscular hydrostats (e.g. octopus arms and elephant trunks) are almost entirely composed of muscle and connective tissue and plant cells can change shape when pressurised by osmosis. Researchers have been inspired by biology to design and build soft robots. With a soft structure and redundant degrees of freedom, these robots can be used for delicate tasks in cluttered and/or unstructured environments. This paper discusses the novel capabilities of soft robots, describes examples from nature that provide biological inspiration, surveys the state of the art and outlines existing challenges in soft robot design, modelling, fabrication and control.

OmniSkins: Robotic skins that turn inanimate objects into multifunctional robots

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (22) ◽  
pp. eaat1853 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joran W. Booth ◽  
Dylan Shah ◽  
Jennifer C. Case ◽  
Edward L. White ◽  
Michelle C. Yuen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Design Approach ◽  
Robot Design ◽  
Soft Robot ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Soft Body ◽  
Soft Robots ◽  
Wide Range

Robots generally excel at specific tasks in structured environments but lack the versatility and the adaptability required to interact with and locomote within the natural world. To increase versatility in robot design, we present robotic skins that can wrap around arbitrary soft bodies to induce the desired motions and deformations. Robotic skins integrate actuation and sensing into a single conformable material and may be leveraged to create a multitude of controllable soft robots with different functions or gaits to accommodate the demands of different environments. We show that attaching the same robotic skin to a soft body in different ways, or to different soft bodies, leads to distinct motions. Further, we show that combining multiple robotic skins enables complex motions and functions. We demonstrate the versatility of this soft robot design approach in a wide range of applications—including manipulation tasks, locomotion, and wearables—using the same two-dimensional (2D) robotic skins reconfigured on the surface of various 3D soft, inanimate objects.

Design and Control of Soft Robots Using Differentiable Simulation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moritz Bächer ◽  
Espen Knoop ◽  
Christian Schumacher
Keyword(s):  
Soft Robots ◽  
And Control

scholarly journals The Catenary Robot: Design and Control of a Cable Propelled by Two Quadrotors

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
Diego S.Dantonio ◽  
Gustavo A. Cardona ◽  
David Saldana
Keyword(s):  
Robot Design ◽  
And Control

scholarly journals Soft Spherical Tensegrity Robot Design Using Rod-Centered Actuation and Control

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee-Huang Chen ◽  
Kyunam Kim ◽  
Ellande Tang ◽  
Kevin Li ◽  
Richard House ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
Robot Design ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Flexible Design ◽  
Spherical Robot ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Control

This paper presents the design, analysis and testing of a fully actuated modular spherical tensegrity robot for co-robotic and space exploration applications. Robots built from tensegrity structures (composed of pure tensile and compression elements) have many potential benefits including high robustness through redundancy, many degrees of freedom in movement and flexible design. However to fully take advantage of these properties a significant fraction of the tensile elements should be active, leading to a potential increase in complexity, messy cable and power routing systems and increased design difficulty. Here we describe an elegant solution to a fully actuated tensegrity robot: The TT-3 (version 3) tensegrity robot, developed at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with NASA Ames, is a lightweight, low cost, modular, and rapidly prototyped spherical tensegrity robot. This robot is based on a ball-shaped six-bar tensegrity structure and features a unique modular rod-centered distributed actuation and control architecture. This paper presents the novel mechanism design, architecture and simulations of TT-3, the first untethered, fully actuated cable-driven six-bar tensegrity spherical robot ever built and tested for mobility. Furthermore, this paper discusses the controls and preliminary testing performed to observe the system’s behavior and performance.

scholarly journals Self-excited air flow passage changing device for periodic pressurization of soft robot

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Toshio Takayama ◽  
Yusuke Sumi
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Robot ◽  
Rotational Motion ◽  
Air Pressure ◽  
Soft Robot ◽  
Pressure Source ◽  
Large Delay ◽  
Soft Robots ◽  
Flow Passage ◽  
Output Pressure ◽  
Air Chamber

AbstractRecently pneumatic-driven soft robots have been widely developed. Usually, the operating principle of this robot is the inflation and deflation of elastic inflatable chambers by air pressure. Some soft robots need rapid and periodic inflation and deflation of their air chambers to generate continuous motion such as progress motion or rotational motion. However, if the soft robot needs to operate far from the air pressure source, long air tubes are required to supply air pressure to its air chambers. As a result, there is a large delay in supplying air pressure to the air chamber, and the motion of the robot slows down. In this paper, we propose a compact device that changes its airflow passages by self-excited motion generated by a supply of continuous airflow. The diameter and the length of the device are 20 and 50 mm, respectively, and can be driven in a small pipe. Our proposed in-pipe mobile robot is connected to the device and can move in a small pipe by dragging the device into it. To apply the device widely to other soft robots, we also discuss a method of adjusting the output pressure and motion frequency.

scholarly journals ACQUIRING AND EXTRACTION OF INFORMATION COLLECTED BY UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES AND OMNIDIRECTIONAL CAMERAS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS THROUGH MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

2020 ◽  
Vol XLII-3/W12-2020 ◽  
pp. 261-265
Author(s):  
M. d. Abreu
Keyword(s):  
Data Acquisition ◽  
Information Management ◽  
City Management ◽  
Management Software ◽  
The Public ◽  
Municipal Administration ◽  
Aerial Vehicles ◽  
Great Progress ◽  
Reducing Costs ◽  
And Control

Abstract. The growth of technology for aerial and land mapping, as well as information management, has made great progress over the past decade. When we talk about public administration, we envision a sector lacking the use of these new features, as it has been using old models of data acquisition and information management, however slowly opening their eyes to this inevitable advance.Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), 360° mapping and Management Software, integrated with a Geographic Information System (GIS), are the latest trend in city management. These features offer quality, agility and reliability, generating an increase in the municipality's total revenue, along with reducing costs throughout the registration and control process.The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the methodologies applied in the phases of air and ground data acquisition, their processing and generated products, the collection of information from city halls and the import of existing data into Tecsystem's management software, as well as the different applications of the information in various secretariats of the public municipal administration.

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