11 accepted papers
This letter presents a novel soft climbing robot characterized by its light weight, flexibility, and the ability to adjust the locomotion distance by extendable arms. The robot has inflatable gripper and arms. These are controlled only by a pneumatic system. The weight of the robot is 858 g, the max
Various types of extendable and contractible soft actuators have been developed by utilizing their strength, lightweight, and flexibility. Most soft actuators focus on either the extending or contracting motion. In this study, we aim to achieve both motions in a single actuator. We propose a novel l
Soft growing robots are a new type of soft mobile robots that can move in environments that are challenging for conventional wheeled robots and interact with the surrounding environment. The bodies of existing soft growing robots are constructed from one tube without branches, which limits their mov
Recently, flexible robots are growing in importance owing to their merits over rigid robots in maneuverability and safety, which equips them to work in unstructured environments, such as occur in medical applications. However, motion planning and control of flexible manipulators is challenging due t
Soft growing robots, a new soft mobile robot, have recently attracted considerable interest. There are many soft growing robots, some of which have irreversible growing and bending motion mechanisms. For such robots, path planning methods that provide information on bending timing improve operation
Soft growing robots have recently attracted considerable interest. They are expected to operate in complicated environments leveraging their flexibility and adaptability. However, some of them are unable to maintain their bending shape without contact with an object, and some of their mechanisms are
Social interaction between a robot and rats is important since the robot can generate reproducible social behaviors across trials. However, lacking internal state feedback from the rat makes current robot-rat interaction a very preliminary level comparing with rat-rat interaction. Previous biologica…
The interaction test between a robotic rat and living rat is considered as a possible way to quantitatively characterize the rat sociality. In such robot-rat interactions, the robot should be designed to fully replicate a real rat in terms of morphological and behavioral characteristics. To address…
One of the main problems faced by land-based mobile robots is their locomotion performance on rough outdoor terrain. We focused on the navigation of grassy areas such as riversides and forests. These have many types of obstacles, which make robot locomotion difficult. Several studies have been condu
We developed a four-arm four-crawler advanced disaster response robot called OCTOPUS. Disaster response robots are expected to be capable of both mobility, e.g., entering narrow spaces over very rough unstable ground, and workability, e.g., conducting complex debris-demolition work. However, convent
Environment recognition is an effective way for a mobile robot to move across rough terrain. In particular, this makes it possible to prevent a tiny mobile robot from getting stuck or turning over. Several studies have been conducted on environment recognition using a laser range finder or camera. H…