11 accepted papers
The mechanical impedance of the human lower-limb joints during locomotion encodes our understanding of how the neuromotor system regulates the behavior of these tasks. Impedance is also a key component of several strategies for translating this behavior to robots, powered prosthetic limbs, and peopl
Replacing spherical robots' hard shells with soft, pressurized tires has the potential to improve their off-road practicality immensely. This change leverages spherical robots as a simple and rugged solution to problems currently addressed using wheeled or tracked vehicles. Though numerous prototype
Lower-limb wearable robots designed to assist people in everyday activities must reliably recover from any momentary confusion about what the user is doing. Such confusion might arise from momentary sensor failure, collision with an obstacle, losing track of gait due to an out-of-distribution stride
Springs are essential mechanical elements that are used across a wide variety of industries and mechanisms. Common across many spring types and applications is the importance of compactness, low mass and customizability. In this paper, we present a novel rotary spring design that is lightweight, com…
Modern exoskeletons are typically developed to optimize for a single, physiological objective, the “gold standard” of which is a reduction of the wearer's metabolic rate. However, recent research suggests that these changes in metabolic rate are not yet perceivable on average. To address this gap, t…
Robotic ankle exoskeletons have been shown to reduce human effort during walking. However, existing ankle exoskeleton control approaches are limited in their ability to apply biomimetic torque across diverse tasks outside of the controlled lab environment. Energy shaping control can provide task-inv…
Mobility disabilities are prominent in society with wide-ranging deficits, motivating modular, partial-assist, lower-limb exoskeletons for this heterogeneous population. This paper introduces the Modular Backdrivable Lower-limb Unloading Exoskeleton (M-BLUE), which implements high torque, low mechan
Natural dynamics, nonlinear optimization, and, more recently, convex optimization are available methods for stiffness design of energy-efficient series elastic actuators. Natural dynamics and general nonlinear optimization only work for a limited set of load kinetics and kinematics, cannot guarantee…
Human joint dynamic stiffness plays an important role in the stability of performance augmentation exoskeletons. In this paper, we consider a new frequency domain model of the human joint dynamics which features a complex value stiffness. This complex stiffness consists of a real stiffness and a hys…
The mechanical design of robotic hands has been converging towards low-inertia, tendon-driven strategies. As tendon driven robotic fingers are serial chain systems, routing strategies with compliant tendons lead to multi-articular coupling between the degrees of freedom. We propose a generalized ana…
This paper considers the problem of numerically efficient planning for legged robot locomotion, aiming towards reactive multi-contact planning as a reliability feature. We propose to decompose the problem into two parts: an extremely low dimensional kinematic search, which only adjusts a geometric p…