11 accepted papers
Flexible manipulators have high degrees of freedom and deformability, enabling dexterous movements and allowing for unexpected contacts with the environment. Underactuated tendon-drive mechanisms are the most widely adopted because of their simplicity and effectiveness. However, they suffer from dif
For infrastructure health monitoring, defects in concrete are periodically inspected by hammering test. Conventional hammering inspection is manually conducted to detect internal concrete defects by recognizing the sounds generated from the hammer strike. Therefore, a robot-based hammering inspectio
Pulsatile flow is widespread in nature, but replicating such impulsive periodic pumping routines with traditional rotary actuators is complex and energetically inefficient. We demonstrate the feasibility of an actuator capable of generating impulsive flow displacement by exploiting the bistable equi
This letter proposes a scanning tactile sensor that amplifies the signal output of a strain gauge deformed into a wave shape and fixes the position of micro defects. In this study, we realized a thin scanning tactile sensor that is sensitive to micro bumps and can be used as artificial skin. The pro
Wearable robots suffer from issues of usability, cost-performance, and battery life. These drawbacks hinder the development of their market and their implementation in healthcare and industry. Back support exoskeletons in particular rely heavily on mechanical storing of energy but are still mostly u…
In this paper, we study a compact wheeled robot that can jump while rolling. Some robots are capable of jumping or rolling, but as far as we know, those robots are not focused on jumping while rolling. We know that animals jump while running to escape from predators. Robots can move quickly by jumpi…
We propose a new wearable device for human joint impedance estimation. The device utilizes snap-through buckling of closed-elastica to impose perturbations on human joints. Actuation is based on the law of momentum conservation, that is, the proposed device induces an impact on human joint dynamics.
This paper proposes a real-time method for estimating the shape of an elastic rod using a robot manipulator equipped with a sense of force. The proposed method does not use optical sensing devices, such as cameras or lasers, but relies only upon the sense of force in the manipulator. In the proposed…
In this paper, we proposed a model for a wire-driven continuum manipulator without assuming constancy in curvatures of the manipulator's shape as a natural extension of the famous and useful constant curvature model. We show that the tip orientation of the continuum manipulator can be decided comple…
In this paper, we propose a real-time spatial shape estimation method for an elastic rod. Our proposed method does not use any image sensor nor shape sensor, but does use a six-axis force/torque sensor placed near one end of the elastic rod. In the proposed shape estimation method, the occlusion pro…
A closed elastica, which is an elastic rod whose both ends are fixed to prescribed two places, can be found in various situations in robotics. In this paper, we investigate validity of the discretized spatial model of a closed elastica. The discretized closed elastica model can be regarded as a seri…