A survey of non-prehensile pneumatic manipulation surfaces: principles, models and control

Laurent, Guillaume J.; Moon, Hyungpil

doi:10.1007/s11370-015-0175-0

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(76 reference statements)

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“…Fluid jets, when generated on a moveable object, can also be used for propulsion . For further reading, see the work by De Volder et al and Laurent et al, the latter of which is a thorough and recent review of pneumatic‐manipulation surfaces. In addition, a recent review by Sánchez et al covers chemical propulsion for miniature systems, including microjetting.…”

Section: Pressure‐driven Soft Actuatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soft Actuators for Small‐Scale Robotics

et al. 2016

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This review comprises a detailed survey of ongoing methodologies for soft actuators, highlighting approaches suitable for nanometer- to centimeter-scale robotic applications. Soft robots present a special design challenge in that their actuation and sensing mechanisms are often highly integrated with the robot body and overall functionality. When less than a centimeter, they belong to an even more special subcategory of robots or devices, in that they often lack on-board power, sensing, computation, and control. Soft, active materials are particularly well suited for this task, with a wide range of stimulants and a number of impressive examples, demonstrating large deformations, high motion complexities, and varied multifunctionality. Recent research includes both the development of new materials and composites, as well as novel implementations leveraging the unique properties of soft materials.

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Section: Pressure‐driven Soft Actuatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Soft Actuators for Small‐Scale Robotics

et al. 2016

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“…A survey of recent developments in the field of contactless manipulation is presented in [9]. The use of airflow for manipulation and control of the localised deformation of wafers has also been studied in [10], while a pick-up head for wafers has been designed using similar concepts in [11].…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Air-Based Contactless Wafer Precision Positioning System

et al. 2021

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This paper presents the development of a contactless sensing system and the dynamic evaluation of an air-bearing-based precision wafer positioning system. The contactless positioning stage is a response to the trend seen in the high-tech industry, where the substrates are becoming thinner and larger to reduce the cost and increase the yield. Using contactless handling it is possible to avoid damage and contamination. The system works by floating the substrate on a thin film of air. A viscous traction force is created on the substrate by steering the airflow. A cascaded control design structure has been implemented on the contactless positioning system, where the inner loop controller (ILC) controls the actuator which steers the airflow and the outer loop controller (OLC) controls the position of the substrate by controlling the reference of the ILC. The dynamics of the ILC are evaluated and optimized for the performance of the positioning of the substrate. The vibration disturbances are also handled by the ILC. The bandwidth of the system has been improved to 300 Hz. For the OLC, a linear charge-coupled device has been implemented as a contactless sensor. The performance of the sensing system has been analysed. During control in steady-state, this resulted in a position error of the substrate of 12.9 μm RMS, which is a little more than two times the resolution. The bandwidth of the OLC is approaching 10 Hz.

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“…In spite of these potential advantages, the use of pneumatic manipulation in robotics has been limited. Prior works have designed systems that use air blowers to move objects along flat surfaces in industrial settings [1] or to control the trajectories of specific types of objects in highly controlled laboratory or industrial settings [2], [3], [4], [5]. However, there is little to no work on utilizing blowers for dynamic manipulation of arbitrary objects in more general settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Pneumatic Non-Prehensile Manipulation with a Mobile Blower

Wu,

Sun,

Zeng

et al. 2022

Preprint

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We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually adapt to unexpected changes from its actions, (ii) maintain finegrained control, since the slightest misstep can result in large unintended consequences (e.g., scatter objects already in a pile), and (iii) infer long-range plans (e.g., move the robot to strategic blowing locations). We tackle these challenges in the context of deep reinforcement learning, introducing a multi-frequency version of the spatial action maps framework. This allows for efficient learning of vision-based policies that effectively combine high-level planning and low-level closed-loop control for dynamic mobile manipulation. Experiments show that our system learns efficient behaviors for the task, demonstrating in particular that blowing achieves better downstream performance than pushing, and that our policies improve performance over baselines. Moreover, we show that our system naturally encourages emergent specialization between the different subpolicies spanning low-level fine-grained control and high-level planning. On a real mobile robot equipped with a miniature air blower, we show that our simulation-trained policies transfer well to a real environment and can generalize to novel objects.

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A survey of non-prehensile pneumatic manipulation surfaces: principles, models and control

Cited by 11 publications

References 49 publications

Soft Actuators for Small‐Scale Robotics

Soft Actuators for Small‐Scale Robotics

Air-Based Contactless Wafer Precision Positioning System

Learning Pneumatic Non-Prehensile Manipulation with a Mobile Blower

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