Fabrication, modeling, and control of plush robots
James M. Bern, Grace Kumagai, Stelian Coros
Abstract
We present a class of tendon-actuated soft robots, which promise to be low-cost and accessible to non-experts. The fabrication techniques we introduce are largely based on traditional techniques for fabricating plush toys, and so we term the robots created using our approach “plush robots.” A plush robot moves by driving internal winches that pull in (or let out) tendons routed through its skin. We provide a forward simulation model for predicting a plush robot's deformation behavior given some contractions of its internal winches. We also leverage this forward model for use in an interactive control scheme, in which the user provides a target pose for the robot, and optimal contractions of the robot's winches are automatically computed in real-time. We fabricate two examples to demonstrate the use of our system, and also discuss the design challenges inherent to plush robots.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2017_fabricationmodel,
title = {Fabrication, modeling, and control of plush robots},
author = {James M. Bern and Grace Kumagai and Stelian Coros},
booktitle = {IROS 2017},
year = {2017}
}