22 accepted papers
Robotic grippers have been extensively developed to enable stable and efficient object manipulation across diverse applications. While soft grippers offer high adaptability and safety, their performance remains constrained by an inherent trade-off between flexibility and load-bearing capacity. This …
Soft robotic fingers can improve adaptability in grasping and manipulation, compensating for geometric variation in object or environmental contact, but today lack force capacity and fine dexterity. Integrated tactile sensors can provide grasp and task information which can improve dexterity, but sh
Although the evolution of mammalian feet has been extensively studied, the development of robotic feet has been slow. However, as legged robots developed, the development of adaptive and highly functional feet became important. This study introduces the Human-inspired Sensorized and Adaptive Foot th
Assistive suits are used in industries to prevent MSDs (musculoskeletal disorders) and improve work efficiency and productivity that can be affected by excessive manual labor. Recently, soft assistive suits have been developed, distinguished by their comfortable fit, easy wearability, and compact de
Soft robotic fingers can safely grasp fragile or variable form objects, but their force capacity is limited, especially with less contact area: precision grasps and when objects are smaller or not spherical. Although most research focuses on improving force capacity through mechanical design modific…
Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) based on inherently compliant materials have been developed by integrating with a fabric, a fiber reinforcement, or applying origami patterns. However, the fabric and fiber-reinforced SPAs are limited by the relatively large volumes of air needed to achieve the desire
Soft pneumatic grippers, which are based on soft pneumatic actuators have been widely studied owing to their simple morphological structure, inherent compliance, and pliable grasp. Additionally, the integration of the soft gripper with various sensors to improve its functionality has also been exten
Marangoni propulsion is well-known aquatic locomotion exhibited by some aquatic insects. After secreting chemicals to reduce the surface tension nearby, they are rapidly propelled by the force originated from the surface tension gradient. Inspired by their locomotion, a water surface skimming device
Polypyrrole (PPy) has been widely used as an electro active polymer actuator owing to its high energy density, and the applicability in low voltage (i.e. less than 3 V) driven systems. Its scalable fabrication process also enables a PPy actuator to be used in mesoscale (a few millimeter to centimete
Various robotic grippers have been developed over the past several decades for robotic manipulators. Especially, the soft grippers based on the soft pneumatic actuator (SPA) have been studied actively, since it offers more pliable bending motion, inherent compliance, and a simple morphological struc
A sensing glove is an attractive application of wearable devices. Soft sensors are emerging to replace rigid sensing units, especially for wearable sensor systems, due to its inherent softness, flexibility, and stretchability. However, the fabrication process for the soft sensors is usually complex,…
Sensed information greatly helps a robot to adjust its motion or modulate the locomotory behavior. While many sensing components have been developed for macroscale robots, such off-the-shelf sensors are hardly integrated with a mesoscale (i.e., 0.1 mm to 10 mm) robot due to the size limitation. In t…
For decades, various robotic grippers have been developed due to its necessity for the robotic manipulators. In case of the conventional robotic grippers with rigid components, an underactuated mechanism was required to satisfy gripping motion. Recently, soft grippers have been studied actively, whi…
In this paper, a wearable hand system for virtual reality is proposed. The proposed system can deliver accurate force to three fingertips (thumb, index, and middle fingers), which play dominant roles in manipulating and interacting with the external environment, and also measure fingertip positions…
Locomotion of water beetles have been widely studied in biology owing to their remarkable swimming skills. Here, we investigated the coordination between the two pairs of legs to achieve steady swimming with novel hair-like appendages. Some design considerations and a fabrication of the hair-like ap…
A Marangoni propulsion is exhibited by some aquatic insects such as rove beetles as a means of rapid escaping by secreting surfactant that lowers the surface tension behind them. Inspired by their locomotion, we proposed a non-tethered miniature robot that can skim and steer on the water surface wit…
In this paper, an asymmetric cable-driven mechanism is proposed for accurate force control of exoskeleton systems with a compact structure. Inspired by the fact that the required forces in human motions are not symmetric in many cases, a spring-actuator type cable-drive mechanism is adopted, which e…
A water beetle is skillful at drag-powered swimming by using its oar-like legs. Inspired by this mechanism, a miniature robot, whose mobility is obtained by a pair of legs attached with swimming appendages, was studied in this work. The robot in this paper has optimally designed linkage structures t…
In this paper, a hand exoskeleton system for virtual reality is proposed. As a virtual reality interface for the hand, a wearable system should be able to measure finger joint angles and apply force feedback to the fingers with a simple and light design. In the proposed system, the finger joint angl…
For physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), it has been an important issue to control the output force of actuators. The aim of this study was to apply a new control strategy, named model-inverse time delay control (MiTDC), to series elastic actuators (SEA) in a lower extremity exoskeleton, even in…
In this paper, a rotational leg-type miniature robot with an actuated middle joint and tail, called RoMiRAMT, is proposed for stable locomotion and improved climbing ability. The robot has four independently actuated rotational legs, giving it advantages of both wheel-type and leg-type locomotion. T…
In this paper, a wearable hand exoskeleton with force-controllable and compact actuator modules is proposed. In order to apply force feedback accurately while allowing natural finger motions, the exoskeleton linkage structure with three degrees of freedom (DOFs) was designed, which was inspired by t…