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Morphology plays an important role in behavioral and locomotion strategies of living and artificial systems. There is biological evidence that adaptive morphological changes can not only extend dynamic performances by reducing tradeoffs during locomotion but also provide new functionalities. In this article, we show that adaptive morphology is an emerging design principle in robotics that benefits from a new generation of soft, variable-stiffness, and functional materials and structures. When moving within a given environment or when transitioning between different substrates, adaptive morphology allows accommodation of opposing dynamic requirements (e.g., maneuverability, stability, efficiency, and speed). Adaptive morphology is also a viable solution to endow robots with additional functionalities, such as transportability, protection, and variable gearing. We identify important research and technological questions, such as variable-stiffness structures, in silico design tools, and adaptive control systems to fully leverage adaptive morphology in robotic systems.
Posted on: September 27, 2016
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Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are found in mobile robots, assistive wearable devices, and rehabilitative technologies. While soft actuators have been one of the most crucial elements of technology leading the development of the soft robotics field, they fall short of force output and bandwidth requirements for many tasks. Additionally, other general problems remain open including robustness, controllability, and repeatability. The SPA-pack architecture presented here aims to satisfy these standards of reliability crucial to the field of soft robotics, while also improving the basic performance capabilities of SPAs by borrowing advantages leveraged ubiquitously in biology; namely the structured parallel arrangement of lower power actuators to form the basis of a larger, more powerful actuator module. An SPA-pack module consisting of a number of smaller SPAs will be studied using an analytical model and physical prototype. Experimental measurements show an SPA-pack to generate over 112 N linear force, while the model indicates the benefit of parallel actuator grouping over a geometrically equivalent single SPA scales as an increasing function of the number of individual actuators in the group. For a module of four actuators, a 23 % increase in force production over a volumetrically equivalent single SPA is predicted and validated, while further gains appear possible up to 50 %. These findings affirm the advantage of utilizing a fascicle structure for high-performance soft robotic applications over existing monolithic SPA designs. An example high-performance soft robotic platform will be presented to demonstrate the capability of SPA-pack modules in a complete and functional system.
Posted on: September 20, 2016
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Posted on: September 16, 2016
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Flying robots are increasingly adopted in search and rescue missions because of their capability to quickly collect and stream information from remote and dangerous areas. To further enhance their use, we are investigating the development of a new class of drones, foldable sensorized hubs that can quickly take off from rescuers’ hands as soon as they are taken out of a pocket or a backpack. With this aim, this paper presents the development of a foldable wing inspired by insects. The wing can be packaged for transportation or deployed for flight in half a second with a simple action from the user. The wing is manufactured as a thick origami structure with a foldable multi-layer material. The prototype of the foldable wing is experimentally characterized and validated in flight on a mini-drone.
Posted on: September 14, 2016
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Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) are versatile robotic components enabling diverse and complex soft robot hardware design. However, due to inherent material characteristics exhibited by their primary constitutive material, silicone rubber, they often lack robustness and repeatability in performance. In this article, we present a novel SPA-based bending module design with shell reinforcement. The bidirectional soft actuator presented here is enveloped in a Yoshimura patterned origami shell, which acts as an additional protection layer covering the SPA while providing specific bending resilience throughout the actuator’s range of motion. Mechanical tests are performed to characterize several shell folding patterns and their effect on the actuator performance. Details on design decisions and experimental results using the SPA with origami shell modules and performance analysis are presented; the performance of the bending module is significantly enhanced when reinforcement is provided by the shell. With the aid of the shell, the bending module is capable of sustaining higher inflation pressures, delivering larger blocked torques, and generating the targeted motion trajectory.
Posted on: September 6, 2016
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This paper describes a brain-machine interface for the online control of a powered lower-limb exoskeleton based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals recorded over the user’s sensorimotor cortical areas. We train a binary decoder that can distinguish two different mental states, which is applied in a cascaded manner to efficiently control the exoskeleton in three different directions: walk front, turn left and turn right. This is realized by first classifying the user’s intention to walk front or change the direction. If the user decides to change the direction, a subsequent classification is performed to decide turn left or right. The user’s mental command is conditionally executed considering the possibility of obstacle collision. All five subjects were able to successfully complete the 3-way navigation task using brain signals while mounted in the exoskeleton. We observed on average 10.2% decrease in overall task completion time compared to the baseline protocol.
Posted on: August 31, 2016
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We present an omnidirectional ball wheel drive design that utilizes a permanent magnet as the drive roller to generate the contact force. Particularly interesting for novel human-mobile robot interaction scenarios where the users are expected to physically interact with many palm-sized robots, our design combines simplicity, low cost and compactness. We first detail our design and explain its key parameters. Then, we present our implementation and compare it with an omniwheel drive built with identical conditions and similar cost. Finally, we elaborate on the main advantages and drawbacks of our design.
Posted on: August 2, 2016
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Posted on: July 22, 2016
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Because standard cameras sample the scene at constant time intervals, they do not provide any information in the blind time between subsequent frames. However, for many high-speed robotic and vision applications, it is crucial to provide high-frequency measurement updates also during this blind time. This can be achieved using a novel vision sensor, called DAVIS, which combines a standard camera and an asynchronous event-based sensor in the same pixel array. The DAVIS encodes the visual content between two subsequent frames by an asynchronous stream of events that convey pixellevel brightness changes at microsecond resolution. We present the first algorithm to detect and track visual features using both the frames and the event data provided by the DAVIS. Features are first detected in the grayscale frames and then tracked asynchronously in the blind time between frames using the stream of events. To best take into account the hybrid characteristics of the DAVIS, features are built based on large, spatial contrast variations (i.e., visual edges), which are the source of most of the events generated by the sensor. An eventbased algorithm is further presented to track the features using an iterative, geometric registration approach. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on real data acquired by the DAVIS.
Posted on: July 22, 2016
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Event-based temporal contrast vision sensors such as the Dynamic Vison Sensor (DVS) have advantages such as high dynamic range, low latency, and low power consumption. Instead of frames, these sensors produce a stream of events that encode discrete amounts of temporal contrast. Surfaces and objects with sufficient spatial contrast trigger events if they are moving relative to the sensor, which thus performs inherent edge detection. These sensors are well-suited for motion capture, but so far suitable event-based, low-level features that allow assigning events to spatial structures have been lacking. A general solution of the so-called event correspondence problem, i.e. inferring which events are caused by the motion of the same spatial feature, would allow applying these sensors in a multitude of tasks such as visual odometry or structure from motion. The proposed Event-based Line Segment Detector (ELiSeD) is a step towards solving this problem by parameterizing the event stream as a set of line segments. The event stream which is used to update these low-level features is continuous in time and has a high temporal resolution; this allows capturing even fast motions without the requirement to solve the conventional frame-to-frame motion correspondence problem. The ELiSeD feature detector and tracker runs in real-time on a laptop computer at image speeds of up to 1300 pix/s and can continuously track rotations of up to 720 deg/s. The algorithm is open-sourced in the jAER project.
Posted on: July 22, 2016
