A soft robotic approach to robust and dexterous grasping

Zhou, Jianshu; Chen, Xiaojiao; Li, Jing; Tian, Ye; Wang, Zheng

doi:10.1109/robosoft.2018.8404954

Cited by 41 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The soft bellows actuator is inject-molded with low-density polyethylene and glued to the rigid skeleton through ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA). Parameters of bellows are listed:

, and

, where

could be obtained from our previous study ( Zhou et al, 2018 ). The radial displacements on setting Joint A, Joint B, and Joint C are

, and

, respectively.…”

Section: Fabrication and Experiments Validationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The key bottle neck of soft robots for payload-and-precision demanding tasks such as marine benthic crawling lies in the soft actuators. With unregulated, omni-directional passive compliance, soft actuators by default could not achieve directional actuation without being soft and flexible in other directions, therefore significantly hindering their levels of force payload and precision ( Zhou et al, 2018 ). Using rigid reinforcements on soft actuators could significantly constrain their compliance and achieve directionality during operation, the approach has been repeatedly proven using pneumatic soft robots as wearable devices and industrial grippers ( Zhou et al, 2018 ; Liu et al, 2020 ; Su et al, 2020 ), achieving dozens of times payload increase without sacrificing lightweightness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Underwater Crawling Robot With Hydraulic Soft Actuators

et al. 2021

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Benthic operation plays a vital role in underwater applications, where crawling robots have advantages compared with turbine-based underwater vehicles, in locomotion accuracy, actuation efficiency, current resistance, and in carrying more payloads. On the other hand, soft robots are quickly trending in underwater robotic design, with their naturally sealed body structure and intrinsic compliance both desirable for the highly unstructured and corrosive underwater environment. However, the limitations resulting directly from the inherent compliance, in structural rigidity, actuation precision, and limited force exertion capability, have also restricted soft robots in underwater applications. To date soft robots are adopted mainly as grippers and manipulators for atraumatic sampling, rather than as locomotion platforms. In this work, we present a soft-robotic approach to designing underwater crawling robots, with three main innovations: 1) using rigid structural components to strategically reinforce the otherwise omni-directionally flexible soft actuators, drastically increasing their loading capability and actuation precision; 2) proposing a rigid–soft hybrid multi-joint leg design, with quasi-linear motion range and force exertion, while maintaining excellent passive impact compliance by exploiting the inherent flexibility of soft actuators; 3) developing a novel valve-free hydraulic actuation system with peristaltic pumps, achieving a compact, lightweight, and untethered underwater crawling robot prototype with a 5:1 payload-to-weight ratio and multi-gait capability. The prototype was tested for design verification and showcasing the advantages of the proposed hybrid mechanism and actuation approach.

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“…The soft bellows actuator is inject-molded with low-density polyethylene and glued to the rigid skeleton through ethyl vinyl acetate (EVA). Parameters of bellows are listed:

, and

, where

could be obtained from our previous study ( Zhou et al, 2018 ). The radial displacements on setting Joint A, Joint B, and Joint C are

, and

, respectively.…”

Section: Fabrication and Experiments Validationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Underwater Crawling Robot With Hydraulic Soft Actuators

et al. 2021

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“…3 (a) , in a compact, lightweight, and safe robotic hand. A novel TSS hand is designed to tackle this challenge [24] – [28] . The TSS hand is designed in a human hand similar configuration and connected at the terminal of the RCM platform, as seen in Fig.…”

Section: Overall Tele-operated Oropharyngeal Swab (Toos) Robot Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tele-Operated Oropharyngeal Swab (TOOS) Robot Enabled by TSS Soft Hand for Safe and Effective Sampling

Chen

Zhou

Cheng

et al. 2021

IEEE Trans. Med. Robot. Bionics

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The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed serious challenges in multiple perspectives of human life. To diagnose COVID-19, oropharyngeal swab (OP SWAB) sampling is generally applied for viral nucleic acid (VNA) specimen collection. However, manual sampling exposes medical staff to a high risk of infection. Robotic sampling is promising to mitigate this risk to the minimum level, but traditional robot suffers from safety, cost, and control complexity issues for wide-scale deployment. In this work, we present soft robotic technology is promising to achieve robotic OP swab sampling with excellent swab manipulability in a confined oral space and works as dexterous as existing manual approach. This is enabled by a novel Tstone soft (TSS) hand, consisting of a soft wrist and a soft gripper, designed from human sampling observation and bio-inspiration. TSS hand is in a compact size, exerts larger workspace, and achieves comparable dexterity compared to human hand. The soft wrist is capable of agile omnidirectional bending with adjustable stiffness. The terminal soft gripper is effective for disposable swab pinch and replacement. The OP sampling force is easy to be maintained in a safe and comfortable range (throat sampling comfortable region) under a hybrid motion and stiffness virtual fixture-based controller. A dedicated 3 DOFs RCM platform is used for TSS hand global positioning. Design, modeling, and control of the TSS hand are discussed in detail with dedicated experimental validations. A sampling test based on human tele-operation is processed on the oral cavity model with excellent success rate. The proposed TOOS robot demonstrates a highly promising solution for tele-operated, safe, cost-effective, and quick deployable COVID-19 OP swab sampling.

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“…In terms of the structure, we constructed the soft actuator with two antagonistic V-shape circle-round-type bellows chambers. [32][33][34][35][36][37] Among inflated soft robotic actuators, bellows chambers have been widely employed for their simplicity and sensitivity to single-DoF deformation. [38][39][40][41][42][43] The bellows chambers used in this study concentrate elongation/ contraction motion in the axial direction.…”

Section: Antagonistic Design Of a Soft Actuator With Bellows Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanoreception for Soft Robots via Intuitive Body Cues

Wang

2020

Soft Robotics

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Mechanoreception, the ability of robots to detect mechanical stimuli from the internal and external environments, contributes significantly to improving safety and task performance during the operation of robots in unstructured environments. Various approaches have been proposed to endow robot systems with mechanoreception. In the case of soft robots, the state-of-the-art mechanosensory solutions typically embedded dedicated deformable sensors into the soft body, giving rise to fabrication complexity and signal sophistication. In this study, we propose a novel mechanoreception scheme to enable pneumatic-driven soft robots to perceive proprioceptive movements as well as external contacts. Both internal and external mechanical parameters can be decoded from intuitive cues of body deformation and pneumatic pressure signals. In contrast to most existing solutions employing dedicated deformable sensors, the proposed approach only utilizes pressure feedback, which is typically available from the pneumatic pressure sensors incorporated in the control loop of most pneumatic soft robots. The concept was implemented and validated on a proprietary robotic gripper with a linear soft pneumatic actuator, demonstrating the capability in simultaneous detection of actuator position and external contact forceAfter the proposed approach, the gripper can achieve both active and passive mechanosensation, with demonstrated experiments in grasping force estimation, contact loss detection, object stiffness identification, and contour measurements. This approach offers an alternative route to achieving excellent internal/environmental awareness without requiring dedicated sensing modalities.

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A soft robotic approach to robust and dexterous grasping

Cited by 41 publications

References 20 publications

Underwater Crawling Robot With Hydraulic Soft Actuators

Underwater Crawling Robot With Hydraulic Soft Actuators

Tele-Operated Oropharyngeal Swab (TOOS) Robot Enabled by TSS Soft Hand for Safe and Effective Sampling

Mechanoreception for Soft Robots via Intuitive Body Cues

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