39 accepted papers
While vacuum-based bending actuation offers benefits such as safety and compactness in soft robotics, it is often overlooked due to its limited actuation pressure, which restricts both bending angle and force output. This study presents a crease-free, origami-inspired vacuum bending actuator that ad…
Robotic grippers are increasingly deployed across industrial, collaborative, and aerial platforms, where each embodiment imposes distinct mechanical, energetic, and operational constraints. Established YCB and NIST benchmarks quantify grasp success, force, or timing on a single platform, but do not
While stretchable and compressible sensors are commonly used to enhance the proprioception and exteroception of soft robots, their sensitivity and sensing range are constrained by their design and stiffness, often limiting their measurement capabilities. To overcome this limitation, this paper prese
Most existing anthropomorphic robotic fingers are either too stiff to offer compliance, or too soft to provide postural stability. Yet human subjects tend to stiffen their finger when producing fingertip forces and lower their joint stiffness when grasping objects. Variable joint stiffness is theref
Industrial robots are capable of moving at high speed. Each time they come into contact with their environment, e.g. to pick up an object, they decelerate to a near standstill. A solution involving a compliant pneumatic gripper and adapted trajectory plan is presented to initiate contact at a higher…
Research on human-friendly robots focuses on safety through software and hardware. Hardware-based safety offers a significant advantage over software-based safety if an accurate hardware model is integrated into the solution. Design of elastic and off-joint actuation has established safety by hardwa
In collaborative robotics, the safety of humans interacting with cobots is crucial. There is a need for collaborative robots that can move quickly while still being safe. This paper introduces the use of a kinematically redundant actuator in impedance control mode to reduce collision forces, aiming
Task and motion planning (TAMP) for robotics manipulation necessitates long-horizon reasoning involving versatile actions and skills. While deterministic actions can be crafted by sampling or optimizing with certain constraints, planning actions with uncertainty, i.e., probabilistic actions, remains
Real-time relative pose (RP) estimation is a cornerstone for effective multi-agent collaboration. When conventional global positioning infrastructure such as GPS is unavailable, the use of Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology on each agent provides a practical means to measure inter-agent range. Due to U
Actuation concepts such as Series Elastic Actuation (SEA), Parallel Elastic Actuation (PEA), and Biarticular Actuation (BA), which introduce elastic elements into the structure, have the potential to reduce the electrical energy consumption of a robot. This letter presents an optimization of the arr
Voxel-based robots are aggregations of soft and simple building blocks that have been extensively evolved and simulated to perform various tasks, like walking, jumping or swimming. However, real-life voxel-based robots are rather scarce because of their challenging design and assembly. With the curr
Robotic manipulation in cluttered environments requires synergistic planning among prehensile and non-prehensile actions. Previous works on sampling-based Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) algorithms, e.g. PDDLStream, provide a fast and generalizable solution for multi-modal manipulation. However, the
Self-healing polymers can address the damage susceptibility in soft robotics. However, in most cases, their healing requires a heat stimulus, provided by an external device. This letter presents a self-healing soft actuator with an integrated healable flexible heater, functioning as the stimuli-prov
Redundant actuators enable to distribute power among two motors, which can be selected optimally in terms of efficiency. We propose a methodology that finds effective combinations of motors and gearboxes for a dynamic load, taking into account the constraints, inertia, and efficiency of each compone
Faster robotic picking of objects can improve industrial production throughput. A gripper design with appropriate control strategy is demonstrated to pick objects at high speed, while being tolerant to unintentional collisions. The design has a quasi–direct drive with backdrivable, rigid finger mech
Collaborative robots can help industry workers to improve their ergonomics. They can propose a safe and ergonomic posture to the workers to reduce the risk of musculoskeletal disorders. Proposing an ergonomic stance needs postural evaluation and optimization. To optimize the workers' posture, we nee…
A hybrid high-speed industrial collaborative robot can switch between collaborative mode and high-speed mode, combining the advantages of both. While promising, this concept comes with some challenges such as dealing with collisions at high speed. An overload clutch with integrated torque sensing an
Gravity compensators are passive devices that can lower the energy consumption of lifting systems by reducing the force/torque required from human users or actuators. This letter presents a prismatic gravity compensator for cranes, gantry, and other lifting systems. It is capable of statically balan
The increasing interest in soft robotics has led to new designs that exploit the combination of multiple materials, increasing robustness and enhancing performance. However, the combination of multiple non-linear materials makes modelling and eventual control of these highly flexible systems challen
This letter proposes a reactive, safe, and high-performance distributed constrained control law for ensuring safety in multi-UAV systems. The UAVs possess higher-order nonlinear dynamics and are subject to actuation and collision avoidance constraints. To address the case of real-time multi-UAV coll
Recent advances in soft robotics in academia have led to the adoption of soft grippers in industrial settings. Due to their soft bending actuators, these grippers can handle delicate objects with great care. However, due to their flexibility, the actuators are prone to out-of-plane deformations upon…
Industrial robots can collide due to malfunctioning, wrong user input or unforeseen changes in the environment in which they operate. Different solutions exist to minimize the damage caused by a collision, either absorbed by the environment or by the robot itself. The specific solution depends on th
New challenges arise when investigating the use of active prostheses for lower limb replacement, such as high motor power requirements, leading to increased weight and reduced autonomy. Series and parallel elasticity are often explored to reduce the necessary motor power but often the effect on the…
Research towards (compliant) actuators, especially redundant ones like the Series Parallel Elastic Actuator (SPEA), has led to the development of drive trains, which have demonstrated to increase efficiency, torque-to-mass-ratio, power-to-mass ratio, etc. In the field of robotics such drive trains c…
In this letter, we present the kinematically redundant series elastic dual-motor actuator (SEDMA). It consists of two motors, coupled to a series spring through a planetary differential. The redundant degree of freedom of this system can be exploited to optimize a specific aspect of the actuation ta
Driven by the desire of amputees to reduce their physical shortcomings, prosthetic feet evolved from passive to propulsive bionic feet, actuated by different types of compliant actuators to provide the push-off power and with the advantage of reducing the motor power requirements. The two-latest in-
On compliant robotic systems, modularity is recently adopted for the ease of up- and downscaling and the possibility to downgrade the costs, by moving towards the combination of standard units instead of custom designs. However, modularity on the actuator level itself lacks more thorough evaluation.
Pneumatic muscles are mostly constructed out of flexible membranes and are implemented in a wide range of robotic applications. In these soft materials, perforations are often caused by overpressuring of the muscles and wear. In many cases, this leads to limited numbers of actuation cycles. In this
Robotic manipulators that are intended to interact with humans in their operating region are systems that need formal safety guarantees. Current solutions cannot handle both input and state constraints, have difficulties handling nonconvex constraints, or are computationally too expensive. To tackle…
Despite significant advancements in the field of wearable robots (WRs), commercial WRs still use traditional direct-drive actuation units to power their joints. On the other hand, in research prototypes compliant actuators are increasingly being used to more adequately address the issues of safety,…
Collaborative robots, the so-called cobots, that work together with the human, are becoming more and more popular in the industrial world. An example of an application where these robots are useful is the assembly task. In this case, the human and the robot complement each other. On one side, the hu…
On novel actuator research in the field of cellular muscle-inspired actuators, skeletal muscles are often used as inspiration due to their modular and compact design and seemingly effortless control. Amongst others, the remaining challenges to tackle are robust designs, energy consumption minimizati…
The control of compliant joint manipulators is challenging for two reasons. First, the elastic elements of the compliant actuators can store an important amount of energy that can be potentially dangerous and needs therefore to be controlled. Second, the compliance introduces nonlinearities and unce
Modern actuation schematics become increasingly ingenious by deploying springs and locking mechanisms in series and/or parallel. Many of these solutions are, however, tailored for a specific application and a general schematic that allows for drastic energy reduction remains a challenge. We have dev
In recent years, many works have appeared, which present novel mechanical designs, control strategies, or trajectory planning algorithms for improved energy efficiency. The actuator model is an essential part of these works, since the optimization of energy consumption strongly depends of the accura
Two leading qualities of skeletal muscle that produce good performance in uncertain environments are damage tolerance and the ability to modulate impedance. For this reason, robotics researchers are greatly interested in discovering the key characteristics of muscles that give them these properties…
Series-Parallel Elastic Actuators (SPEA) enable variable recruitment of parallel springs and variable load cancellation. In previous work, we validated a MACCEPA-based SPEA prototype with a self-closing intermittent mechanism, to reduce motor load and improve energy efficiency. However, the mechanis…
Last 15 years, a wide range of self-healing (SH) materials has been developed and recently these materials are increasingly used in applications in multiple fields, like the automotive industry and aerospace. However, so far this material technology is not yet explored in robotics. The introduction…
The Mechanically Adjustable Compliance and Controllable Equilibrium Position Actuator (MACCEPA) is a Variable Stiffness Actuator (VSA) where both equilibrium position and stiffness of the actuator can be controlled independently. It uses only one linear spring and has a simple design but its compact…