10 accepted papers
For the shape control of deformable free-form surfaces, simulation plays a crucial role in establishing the mapping between the actuation parameters and the deformed shapes. The differentiation of this forward kinematic mapping is usually employed to solve the inverse kinematic problem for determini…
In this letter, we presented a data-driven framework to optimize the out-of-plane stiffness for soft grippers to achieve mechanical properties as hard-to-twist and easy-to-bend. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated in the design of a soft pneumatic bending actuator (SPBA). First, a new o
Multi-axis additive manufacturing enables high flexibility of material deposition along dynamically varied directions. The Cartesian motion platforms of these machines include three parallel axes and two rotational axes. Singularity on rotational axes is a critical issue to be tackled in motion plan
Multi-directional 3D printing has the capability of decreasing or eliminating the need for support structures. Recent work proposed a beam-guided search algorithm to find an optimized sequence of plane-clipping, which gives volume decomposition of a given 3D model. Different printing directions are
This letter tackles the problem of energy-efficient coverage path planning for exploring general surfaces by an autonomous vehicle. Efficient algorithms are developed to generate paths on freeform 3-D surfaces according to a special design pattern as height extremity aware Fermat spiral for this pur
Manual plant phenotyping is slow, error prone, and labor intensive. In this letter, we present an automated robotic system for fast, precise, and noninvasive measurements using a new deep-learning-based next-best view planning pipeline. Specifically, we first use a deep neural network to estimate a
We present a novel method for caging grasps in this paper by stretching ropes on the surface of a 3D object. Both topology and shape of a model to be grasped has been considered in our approach. Our algorithm can guarantee generating local minimal rings on every topological branches of a given model
We present a general solution for steering microrobotic swarm by dynamic actuating fields. In our approach, the motion of micro-robots is controlled by changing the actuating direction of a field applied to them. The time-series sequence of actuating field's directions can be computed automatically.
This paper presents a framework to compute stable contact interfaces for automatically designing customized jigs used in bone surgeries. Given the surface model of a bone represented by polygonal meshes, we find out a small region on the surface to be used as the interface of a customized jig so tha…
We tackle the problem of photometric stereo under near point lighting in this paper. Different from the conventional formulation of photometric stereo that assumes parallel lighting, photometric stereo under the near point lighting condition is a nonlinear problem as the local surface normals are co…