11 accepted papers
The fit of a wearable device, such as a prosthesis, can be quantitatively characterized by the mechanical coupling at the user-device interface. It is thought that the mechanical impedance, specifically the stiffness and damping, of wearable device interfaces can significantly impact human performan…
Whiskers are widely used by animals for sensing physical interactions with their environments. By combining the Kirigami skin pop-up feature and flexible conducting layer, we designed a deployable Kirigami whisker sensor. The sensor can deploy from a flat state to a sensing state while whisker stiff…
Roboticists have increasingly sought to incorporate mechanical compliance into legged robots to realize a range of potential benefits, from improved agility to resilience in complex environments. A promising approach for building compliance into robot legs is to utilize the pneumatic artificial musc…
Underwater roll rotation is a basic but essential maneuver that allows many biological swimmers to achieve high maneuverability and complex locomotion patterns. In particular, sea mammals (e.g., sea otter) with flexible vertebra structures have a unique mechanism to efficiently achieve roll rotation…
Although autonomous control of robotic manipulators has been studied for several decades, they are not commonly used in safety-critical applications due to lack of safety and performance guarantees - many of them concerning the modulation of interaction forces. This paper presents a mechanical probi…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades but is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance guarantees - a large proportion of them concerning the modulation of inte…
This paper discusses the design and preliminary evaluation of a soft pneumatic socket (SPS) with real-time pressure regulation and an automated underactuated donning mechanism (UDM). The ability to modulate the pressure at the human-socket interface of a prosthesis or wearable device to accommodate…
A low-cost optical sensing method for improved measurement and control of soft pneumatic manipulator motion is presented. The core of a soft continuum robot is embedded with several optically-diffuse elastomer sensors which attenuate light depending on their strain mode and degree. The optical senso…
Force feedback during robotic surgery is critical in order to minimize potential injury to the patient and decrease recovery time from surgical procedures. Here we describe the use of a novel strain gauge printing method to apply low profile, low cost sensors directly to the surface of da Vinci surg…
This paper presents the design and experimental validation of a soft pneumatic artificial muscle with position and force sensing capabilities. Conductive liquid-based soft sensors are embedded in a fiber-reinforced contractile actuator to measure two modes of deformation - axial strain and diametral…
This paper presents the design and control of a teleoperated robotic system for dexterous micromanipulation tasks at the meso-scale, specifically open microsurgery. Robotic open microsurgery is an unexplored yet potentially a high impact area of surgical robotics. Microsurgical operations, such as m…