7 accepted papers
Elephants cannot intentionally control individual trunk muscles but instead generate coordinated movements. This coordination, known as kinematic synergy, allows muscles to work together, reducing the controlled degrees of freedom (DOF) while enhancing motion efficiency. In this paper, we develop an
Recently, it has become possible to easily design and fabricate robotic systems in the laboratory and at home due to the recent development of 3D printer technology. On the other hand, the strength of the plastic materials used in reasonably priced 3D printers and the accuracy of the printed parts a…
Synergy provides a practical approach for expressing various postures of a multi-fingered hand. However, a conventional synergy defined for reproducing grasping postures cannot perform in-hand manipulation, e.g., tasks that involve simultaneously grasping and manipulating an object. Locking the posi…
This paper presents a force-sensorless collision detection approach based on virtual contacts. A series of indices based on virtual instantaneous powers are introduced associating to several virtual contacts defined on corresponding links of a manipulator. A possible contact link can be determined b…
Tendons in tendon-driven mechanisms are relatively weak components and sometimes break. This letter proposes a detection method of tendon breakage and a switching control system for tendon-driven mechanisms with redundant tendons. The detection method immediately detects the tendon breakage from the
This paper proposes a method to design low-cost robotic hands that require almost toolless assembly, and have special transmissions and joint mechanisms. The transmissions consist of active and passive gear trains manufactured by 3D printers to realize coordinated motions among joints and to transmi…
Tendon-driven mechanisms (TDMs) are mechanisms driven by more tendons than joints. This tendon redundancy is often used for changing the hardware compliance. In contrast, in this paper, the redundancy is used for coping with unexpected tendon breaking. We analyze kinematics of a class of TDMs with a…