The Quest for Natural Machine Motion: An Open Platform to Fast-Prototyping Articulated Soft Robots

Santina, Cosimo Della; Piazza, Cristina; Gasparri, Gian Maria; Bonilla, Manuel; Catalano, Manuel G.; Grioli, Giorgio; Garabini, Manolo; Bicchi, Antonio

doi:10.1109/mra.2016.2636366

Cited by 101 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 27 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…Additionally, position might be added as a control quantity in a hybrid control approach. Realizing soft actuation and such combined and hybrid controls could be the new frontiers for soft robotic hands [42].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechatronic designs for a robotic hand to explore human body experience and sensory-motor skills: a Delphi study

et al. 2018

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To bridge the gap between users' expectations and technological solutions, a better understanding of human body experience and sensory motor skills is mandatory. This could pave the way towards a novel generation of robotic hands, which can be successfully employed in everyday life e.g. in prosthetics and assistive robotics.A better understanding of human body experience and the embodiment of artificial limbs could path the way towards a novel generation of robotic hands. Such hands could serve as assistive devices, which closely matching users' expectations and needs. AYet, available robotic hands are still far from matching the requirements of the corresponding experimental and real-world applications, e.g., fast motions might be achieved at the expense of accuracy. Knowledge ofabout the users' sensorymotor skills can additionally guide technical developments, e.g., prosthetic design processes. TTo enable proper psychological and biomechanical investigation, this paper presents design solutions developed in a Delphi study. Explorative questionnaires are prepared to acquire and elaborate expert opinions to improve the design of previously developed robotic anthropomorphic hands. By gathering and fusing expert opinions, novel robotic hand and wrist concepts specifically optimized regarding body experience and sensory-motor skill research are developed. In three rounds, experts with experience in robotic hand design and/or control analyze, develop, and rank solutions for mechanisms, actuators, and control solutions, which result in overall design concepts. The technical concepts and implications resulting from the study are discussed considering psychological and biomechanical aspectsconstraints.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechatronic designs for a robotic hand to explore human body experience and sensory-motor skills: a Delphi study

et al. 2018

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“…The power output can be adapted to the requested power input of the actuator via firmware, regardless of the power source actually applied to the board. More information can be freely downloaded from Natural Machine Motion Initiative 2 [18].…”

Section: B Control Boardmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relaying the High-Frequency Contents of Tactile Feedback to Robotic Prosthesis Users: Design, Filtering, Implementation, and Validation

Fani

Blasio

Bianchi

et al. 2019

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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It is known that high frequency tactile information conveys useful cues to discriminate important contact properties for manipulation, such as first-contact and roughness. Despite this, no practical system, implementing a Modality Matching paradigm, has been developed so far to convey this information to users of upper-limb prostheses. The main obstacle to this implementation is the presence of unwanted vibrations generated by the artificial limb mechanics, which are not related to any haptic exploration task. In this work, we describe the design of a digital system which can record accelerations from the fingers of an artificial hand, and reproduce them on the user's skin through voice-coil actuators. Particular attention has been devoted to the design of the filter, needed to cancel all those vibrations measured by the sensors that do not convey information on meaningful contact events. The performance of the newly designed filter is also compared with the state of the art. Exploratory experiments with prosthesis users have identified some applications where this kind of feedback could lead to sensory-motor performance enhancement. Results show that the proposed system improves the perception of object-salient features such as first-contact events, roughness and shape.

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“…soft robots. The interested reader can refer to [1] for a survey about soft robots with deformable bodies, or to [2] for robots with elastic elements lumped at the joint level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Time-Optimal Trajectory Planning for Flexible Joint Robots

Palleschi

Mengacci

Angelini

et al. 2020

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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In this paper, a new approach is proposed to optimally plan the motion along a parametrized path for flexible joint robots, i.e., robots whose structure is purposefully provided with compliant elements. State-of-the-art methods efficiently solve the problem in case of torque-controlled rigid robots via a translation of the optimal control problem into a convex optimization problem. Recently, we showed that, for jerk-controlled rigid robots, the problem could be recast into a non-convex optimization problem. The non-convexity is given by bilinear constraints that can be efficiently handled through McCormick relaxations and spatial Branch-and-Bound techniques. In this paper, we show that, even in case of robots with flexible joints, the time-optimal trajectory planning problem can be recast into a non-convex problem in which the non-convexity is still given by bilinear constraints. We performed experimental tests on a planar 2R elastic manipulator to validate the benefits of the proposed approach. The scalability of the method for robots with multiple degrees of freedom is also discussed.

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The Quest for Natural Machine Motion: An Open Platform to Fast-Prototyping Articulated Soft Robots

Cited by 101 publications

References 27 publications

Mechatronic designs for a robotic hand to explore human body experience and sensory-motor skills: a Delphi study

Mechatronic designs for a robotic hand to explore human body experience and sensory-motor skills: a Delphi study

Relaying the High-Frequency Contents of Tactile Feedback to Robotic Prosthesis Users: Design, Filtering, Implementation, and Validation

Time-Optimal Trajectory Planning for Flexible Joint Robots

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