11 accepted papers
Hip assistance with cable-driven devices has been proven to help decrease the metabolic cost of gait. However, most existing devices use heavy actuating modules or provide assistance in only one direction, limiting the effectiveness. Cable-driven devices are also difficult to accurately estimate the
A convenient situation can be realized if home robots replace housework. However, tasks in an actual home environment are challenging for robots. Particularly, cleaning the table after eating is challenging because of the cluttered environments and various tableware shapes. This study presents a new…
This paper proposes a novel approach to address the technical challenges of stable object grasping, particularly in the context of handling tableware in a home environment. Handling tableware is particularly important, yet challenging, due to the flat nature of most tableware objects and the need to…
Pose estimation is a key challenge in robot manipulation and grasping task. Current object pose estimation approaches based on 3D models and depth sensor information have difficulties to handle transparent objects because of the limitation to capture the accurate depth information. To address these…
With the current trend of dwindling life cycle of production, necessity of systems with high-adaptability is on the rise. With their high adaptability and easy maintenance, reconfigurable manipulators are strong candidates to replace conventional non-reconfigurable manipulators in such trend. Howeve
We present a transformable catheter head structure for endoscopic catheter allowing the simultaneous use of a camera module and a large tool channel introduced through a small incision. At the site of interest, the head with a camera can be expanded from the initial straight configuration, which ope…
A laparoscopic surgery can be made less invasive by utilizing slimmer tools. However, at the size scale of the microlaparoscopic instruments, it has been very challenging to incorporate a wrist mechanism for dexterous manipulation at the surgical sites. In this letter, we present a 5-mm wristed inst
Anthropomorphic arm manipulators usually consist of as a series of revolute joints and links. In this paper, serial-chain manipulators are described by a novel kinematic representation using a series of type R or T joints, which are classified according to relation between a rotational axis and two
Design optimization and fabrication of concentric tube robots are time consuming because of the complexity of their workspaces and the characteristics of the superelastic materials used to make them. This paper presents a procedure for the expeditious design and fabrication of a concentric tube robo…
Shape tracking using a fiber Bragg grating sensor is a promising tool due to its thin, flexible, and weightless nature. Conventional investigations attached optical fibers with a metal rod which limited the curvature due to its stiffness and increased distance between the center of the fiber and tha…
This paper proposes a position and stiffness bounding approach (PSBA) for improving “geometry transparency” in time-delayed teleoperations. The proposed method can rapidly update the local model location in master site to the contact location in the slave site. The proposed PSBA can therefore avoid…