Tensegrity Robotics

Shah, Dylan; Booth, Joran W.; Baines, Robert; Wang, Kun; Vespignani, Massimo; Bekris, Kostas E.; Kramer‐Bottiglio, Rebecca

doi:10.1089/soro.2020.0170

Cited by 73 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 97 publications

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“…Therefore, they are often implemented as manipulators or limbs as a part of a larger robot system [7][8][9][10][11]. Balancing these two concepts, research in tensegrity robots is growing owing to their unique characteristics [12]. Tensegrity robots are naturally compliant to external loads while retaining certain stiffness, that is, being soft and rigid at the same time.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Articulating Resilience: Adaptive Locomotion of Wheeled Tensegrity Robot

Wang¹,

Post²,

Tyrrell³

2022

Electronics

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Resilience plays an important role in improving robustness for robots in harsh environments such as planetary exploration and unstructured terrains. As a naturally compliant structure, tensegrity presents advantageous flexibility for enhancing resilience in robotic applications according to existing research. However, tensegrity robots to date are normally based on monolithic morphologies and are slow in locomotion. In this paper, we demonstrate how we adopt such flexibility to improve the robustness of wheeled robots by articulating modules with tensegrity mechanisms. The test results reveal the robot is resistant and resilient to external hazards in a fully passive manner owing to the continuous elasticity in the structure network. It possesses a good number of DoFs and can adapt to various terrains easily either with actuation or not. The robot is also capable of crawling locomotion aside from wheeled locomotion to traverse uneven surfaces and provide self-recovery from rollovers. It demonstrates good robustness and mobility at the same time compared with existing tensegrity robots and shows the competitiveness with conventional rigid robots in harsh scenarios. The proposed robot presents the capability of tensegrity robots with resilience, robustness, agility, and mobility without compromise. In a broader perspective, it widens the potential of tensegrity robots in practical applications.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Articulating Resilience: Adaptive Locomotion of Wheeled Tensegrity Robot

Wang¹,

Post²,

Tyrrell³

2022

Electronics

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“…Tensegrity robots' adaptability and compliance have motivated their use in many applications, such as manipulation [15], locomotion [21], morphing airfoil [8] and spacecraft landers [5]. While their versatility is exciting, tensegrity robots are difficult to track, model and control because of their complex dynamics [23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Accurately estimating the state of a tensegrity robot, i.e., the 6-DoF pose of each rod, remains a grand challenge in this domain [23]. Vision-based pose estimation is especially challenging due to noisy observations, self-occlusions, and a large number of degrees of freedom as shown in Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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6N-DoF Pose Tracking for Tensegrity Robots

Lu¹,

Johnson²,

Wang³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Tensegrity robots, which are composed of rigid compressive elements (rods) and flexible tensile elements (e.g., cables), have a variety of advantages, including flexibility, light weight, and resistance to mechanical impact. Nevertheless, the hybrid soft-rigid nature of these robots also complicates the ability to localize and track their state. This work aims to address what has been recognized as a grand challenge in this domain, i.e., the pose tracking of tensegrity robots through a marker-less, vision-based method, as well as novel, on-board sensors that can measure the length of the robot's cables. In particular, an iterative optimization process is proposed to estimate the 6-DoF poses of each rigid element of a tensegrity robot from an RGB-D video as well as endcap distance measurements from the cable sensors. To ensure the pose estimates of rigid elements are physically feasible, i.e., they are not resulting in collisions between rods or with the environment, physical constraints are introduced during the optimization. Real-world experiments are performed with a 3-bar tensegrity robot, which performs locomotion gaits. Given ground truth data from a motion capture system, the proposed method achieves less than 1 cm translation error and 3 degrees rotation error, which significantly outperforms alternatives. At the same time, the approach can provide pose estimates throughout the robot's motion, while motion capture often fails due to occlusions.

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“…[30] Soft actuating materials can deform into different target shapes through expansion, contraction, bending, twisting, or combination in response to different actuation inputs, [27] including pneumatic/hydraulic pressurization, [7,31] temperature, [32] solvent, [33] moisture, [34,35] light, [36][37][38] electricity, [39,40] and magnetic fields. [41,42] These materials can be further integrated with rich structural designs to expand and enhance robotic performances, including bilayer structures, [43,44] fiber-reinforced structures, [45] flexible mechanical metamaterials, [46] tensegrity structures, [47][48][49] origami/kirigami structures, [32,[50][51][52] and bistable structures. [53,54] Among these different structural designs, bistable structures distinct themselves due to the possession of two stable equilibrium states, as opposed to a single stable state in most of the other structurally stable designs.…”

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confidence: 99%

Bistable and Multistable Actuators for Soft Robots: Structures, Materials, and Functionalities

et al. 2022

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Snap‐through bistability is often observed in nature (e.g., fast snapping to closure of Venus flytrap) and the life (e.g., bottle caps and hair clippers). Recently, harnessing bistability and multistability in different structures and soft materials has attracted growing interest for high‐performance soft actuators and soft robots. They have demonstrated broad and unique applications in high‐speed locomotion on land and under water, adaptive sensing and fast grasping, shape reconfiguration, electronics‐free controls with a single input, and logic computation. Here, an overview of integrating bistable and multistable structures with soft actuating materials for diverse soft actuators and soft/flexible robots is given. The mechanics‐guided structural design principles for five categories of basic bistable elements from 1D to 3D (i.e., constrained beams, curved plates, dome shells, compliant mechanisms of linkages with flexible hinges and deformable origami, and balloon structures) are first presented, alongside brief discussions of typical soft actuating materials (i.e., fluidic elastomers and stimuli‐responsive materials such as electro‐, photo‐, thermo‐, magnetic‐, and hydro‐responsive polymers). Following that, integrating these soft materials with each category of bistable elements for soft bistable and multistable actuators and their diverse robotic applications are discussed. To conclude, perspectives on the challenges and opportunities in this emerging field are considered.

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Tensegrity Robotics

Cited by 73 publications

References 97 publications

Articulating Resilience: Adaptive Locomotion of Wheeled Tensegrity Robot

Articulating Resilience: Adaptive Locomotion of Wheeled Tensegrity Robot

6N-DoF Pose Tracking for Tensegrity Robots

Bistable and Multistable Actuators for Soft Robots: Structures, Materials, and Functionalities

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