9 accepted papers
This paper introduces a crawler robot equipped with a movable bending point mechanism that allows it to bend anywhere along its trunk. The robot features a movable motor unit that travels along its body, dynamically adjusting the bending initiation point. This enables the robot to move forward and b
Bio-inspired multi-joint snake robots offer the advantages of terrain adaptability due to their limbless structure and high flexibility. However, a series of dozens of motor units in typical multiple-joint snake robots results in a heavy body structure and hundreds of watts of high power consumption
Continuum robot arms that can access confined spaces are useful in many applications, such as invasive surgery, search and rescue, and inspection. However, their reach is often limited because their extension mechanism relies on elastic deformation or folding structures. To address this challenge, w
This letter proposes a palm-sized omnidirectional mobile robot with two torus wheels. A single torus wheel is made of an elastic elongated coil spring in which the two ends of the coil connected each other and is driven by a piezoelectric actuator (stator) that can generate 2-degrees-of-freedom (axi
Woodpeckers have flexible and extendable tongues that they use to reach their prey through tiny openings in trees and insect burrows. This unique capability of their tongue represents a promising design for a tool for picking up and handling objects in unstructured environments. Although continuum r
We propose a twin coil spring-based soft actuator that can move forward and backward with extensibility and can bend left and right with flexibility. It is driven by two flexible ultrasonic motors, each consisting of a compact metallic stator and an elastic elongated coil spring. The position of the
Typical continuum robots, such as pneumatic and tendon-driven robots, have a restricted section length and require a large external component for pulleys and a compressor, making them unsuitable for locomotion. This paper presents a new mobile continuum robot design with virtually unlimited extensib…
We present a flexible ultrasonic motor that generates linear motion as a novel soft actuator. This motor is comprised of a single cube stator with a through-hole, and a flexible coil spring inserted into the hole. The coil spring, which has a diameter of 10 mm and length of 200 mm, is translated by…
We propose an eye robot system with master-slave control using operator-gaze tracking data, which can produce a high response level such as that of the human eyes. The operators can move a remote robot camera by only moving their eye (master) in front of an eye tracking apparatus and obtain visual i…