There has been an explosion of ideas in soft robotics over the past decade, resulting in unprecedented opportunities for end effector design. Soft robot hands offer benefits of low-cost, compliance, and customized design, with the promise of dexterity and robustness. The space of opportunities is vast and exciting. However, new tools are needed to understand the capabilities of such manipulators and to facilitate manipulation planning with soft manipulators that exhibit free-form deformations. To address this challenge, we introduce a sampling based approach to discover and model continuous families of manipulations for soft robot hands. We give an overview of themore »
Design and Control of Foam Hands for Dexterous Manipulation
There has been great progress in soft robot design, manufacture, and control in recent years, and soft robots are a tool of choice for safe and robust handling of objects in conditions of uncertainty. Still, dexterous in-hand manipulation using soft robots remains a challenge. This paper introduces foam robot hands actuated by tendons sewn through a fabric glove. The flexibility of tendon actuation allows for high competence in utilizing deformation for robust in-hand manipulation. We discuss manufacturing, control, and design optimization for foam robots and demonstrate robust grasping and in-hand manipulation on a variety of different physical hand prototypes.
- Award ID(s):
- 1637853
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10201824
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Humanoid Robotics
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 01
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 1950033
- ISSN:
- 0219-8436
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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