7 accepted papers
This paper explores a novel approach to dexterous manipulation, aimed at levels of speed, precision, robustness, and simplicity suitable for practical deployment. The enabling technology is a Direct-drive Hand (DDHand) comprising two fingers, two DOFs each, that exhibit high speed and a light touch.…
Localizing contacts and collisions is an important aspect of failure detection and recovery for robots and can aid perception and exploration of the environment. Contrary to state-of-the-art methods that rely on forces and torques measured on the robot, this paper proposes a kinematic method for pro…
The Direct Drive Hand (DDHand) project is exploring an alternative design philosophy for grippers. The conventional approach is to prioritize clamping force, leading to high gear ratios, slow motion, and poor transmission of force/motion signals. Instead, the DDHand prioritizes transparency: we view…
Hundreds of billions of small screws are assembled in consumer electronics industry every year, yet reliably automating the screwdriving process remains one of the most challenging tasks. Two barriers to further adoption of robotic threaded fastening systems are system cost and technical challenges,…
This paper explores the quasi-static motion of a planar slider being pushed or pulled through a single contact point assumed not to slip. The main contribution is to derive a method for computing exact bounds on the object's motion for classes of pressure distributions where the center of pressure i…
We give a system overview and initial experimental results for SIMbot (spherical induction motor based ballbot), a human-sized dynamically stable mobile robot with only two active moving parts. SIMbot is a qualitatively new kind of robot with the potential to drastically reduce mechanical complexity
This paper describes the design, construction, and operation of a closed-loop spherical induction motor (SIM) ball wheel for a balancing mobile robot (ballbot). Following earlier work, this new design has a smaller rotor and higher torques due to the use of six stators in a skewed layout. Actuation…