13 accepted papers
While collaborative robotic arms offer significant safety benefits, safety of the overall manipulator system cannot be guaranteed unless equally strict safety requirements are satisfied by the accompanying end-effector. Current robot grippers are not made in a way that fulfills such a requirement, r…
As robots move toward more complex environments, imbuing them with a sense of touch similar to humans becomes increasingly important. To fulfill that goal, there has been significant research conducted in the past few decades to develop a tactile sensor that matches human level touch capabilities. R…
Research around tactile sensing for grasp stability prediction in robotic manipulators continues to be popular, however few works are able to achieve a high classification accuracy. Due to simulation complexity, data-driven methods are often forced to rely on experimental data, yielding small, often…
The 2018 IROS Fan Robotic Challenge tasked participants with programming a robot to autonomously open and close a Spanish folding fan, highlighting the obstacles still associated with the dexterous manipulation of objects for robotic systems. Since high DoFs grippers are complex to coordinate and ov…
Effective handling of delicate objects remains a challenging problem in manufacturing. Instead of using a specialized gripper or control scheme, we present a solution involving gecko-inspired directional adhesives affixed to an industrial robot gripper and tactile sensor. The adhesives sustain large
In this letter, we propose a new type of electromagnetic actuator called the “programmable permanent magnet” (PPM) actuator. The PPM actuator is designed to tackle low-speed high-torque applications where classic electromagnetic actuators are highly inefficient. The PPM actuator is based on the appl
As technology develops, manufacture process becomes more and more automated using robots. There is demand for high performance tactile sensor which can support robotic grippers in manipulation tasks especially for unstructured flexible objects. Despite the efforts that have been spent, the fabricati…
Today, collaborative robots are often taught new tasks through “teaching by demonstration” techniques rather than manual programming. This works well for many tasks; however, some tasks like precise tight-fitting insertions can be hard to recreate through exact position replays because they also inv…
The growing demand in industry for robots capable of performing a variety of tasks requires an increased capability in robotic grasping. Humans are adept at interacting with novel objects, a skill attributed primarily to tactile feedback in the form of exteroception and proprioception. This paper pr…
Grasping tasks have always been challenging for robots, despite recent innovations in vision-based algorithms and object-specific training. If robots are to match human abilities and learn to pick up never-before-seen objects, they must combine vision with tactile sensing. This paper present a novel…
This paper explores the use of haptic and visual feedback during routine object-manipulation tasks. We conducted tests of slippage detection, contact detection, and grasp control, with the help of twelve human participants. During the tests, the subjects controlled the robotic arm of a UR5 Universal
Robotic operations that involve the displacement of objects generate different kinds of dynamic events. These may simply correspond to normal robot-related motion, or contact(s) with the object(s) during grasping, but they may also be potentially-problematic events like slippage. In this paper, we u
This paper describes the design and manufacturing of soft artificial skin with an array of embedded soft strain sensors for detecting various hand gestures by measuring joint motions of five fingers. The proposed skin was made of a hyperelastic elastomer material with embedded microchannels filled w…