Development of a non-contact conveyance system composed of distributed nozzle units

Konishi, Satoshi; Mizuguchi, Yusuke; Ohno, Keisuke

doi:10.1109/etfa.1999.815409

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Air manipulation is also used in many robot gripper designs, such as suction grippers [52,48,2] and non-contact grippers, using the Bernoulli principle [7,26,27,6]. Early works also investigated systems that levitated rigid objects using controllable airflow [25,38,8] including non-contact conveyance systems [15,16,17,29,4]. In contrast to these prior approaches, which primarily focus on mechanical hardware design, our goal is to learn effective manipulation policies using off-the-shelf hardware (UR5 robots and a $20 air pump).…”

Section: Manipulation With Airmentioning

confidence: 99%

DextAIRity: Deformable Manipulation Can be a Breeze

Xu¹,

Cheng²,

Burchfiel³

et al. 2022

Robotics: Science and Systems XVIII

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This paper introduces DextAIRity, an approach to manipulate deformable objects using active airflow. In contrast to conventional contact-based quasi-static manipulations, Dex-tAIRity allows the system to apply dense forces on out-ofcontact surfaces, expands the system's reach range, and provides safe high-speed interactions. These properties are particularly advantageous when manipulating under-actuated deformable objects with large surface areas or volumes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DextAIRity through two challenging deformable object manipulation tasks: cloth unfolding and bag opening. We present a self-supervised learning framework that learns to effectively perform a target task through a sequence of grasping or air-based blowing actions. By using a closed-loop formulation for blowing, the system continuously adjusts its blowing direction based on visual feedback in a way that is robust to the highly stochastic dynamics. We deploy our algorithm on a real-world three-arm system and present evidence suggesting that DextAIRity can improve system efficiency for challenging deformable manipulation tasks, such as cloth unfolding, and enable new applications that are impractical to solve with quasistatic contact-based manipulations (e.g., bag opening).

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Section: Manipulation With Airmentioning

confidence: 99%

DextAIRity: Deformable Manipulation Can be a Breeze

Xu¹,

Cheng²,

Burchfiel³

et al. 2022

Robotics: Science and Systems XVIII

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“…Blowing is a form of pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation [7], [8] as well as a form of dynamic manipulation [9], [10], [11], [12], [13] in which the manipulator uses aerodynamic forces to effect change on the physical world. Early work in this area used distributed air flow to manipulate planar objects for conveyance systems [14], [15] (e.g., semiconductor wafers, biscuits) or to keep rectangular objects in equilibrium [16]. Air flow or pneumatic systems have also been used for sphere sorting [2], levitation [17], [18], manipulating sliced fruit and vegetables [3], and manipulating non-rigid materials [4] such as garments [5], [13], woven fabric [19], and paper [20].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

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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“…Based on the Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, air flow actuator for convayance system [9], [10], ciliary motion systems composed of bimorph polyimide materials [11][12][13][14], and vector force fields using actuator arrays [15][16][17] have been developed. In these systems, the MEMS technology is used to develop various actuators to achieve distinguish function.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvement of sawtooth shape generated by anisotropic etching process of single-crystal silicon for microparts feeding using horizontal and symmetric vibrations

Mitani

Matsuo

et al. 2013

2013 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics

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Etching process is a fabrication technology to generate a pattern on a single crystal silicon wafer. The etching process can generate stable and precise periodic pattern on the silicon wafer with a pitch of smaller than 100 µm order according to the etching mask on the surface and characteristics of surface plane orientation. Using a silicon wafer with a plain orientation of [221], an asymmetric periodic structure is generated on its surface because the etching speed is different between forward and backward of the crystal face. We previously showed that microparts can be fed along an asymmetric microfabricated surface using simple planar symmetric vibrations. Microparts move in one direction because they adhere to the microfabricated surface asymmetrically. We developed sawtoothed surfaces with an elevation angle of 20 deg and various pitches of from 10 to 100 micrometer on the surface of silicon wafer material using a dicing saw with a bevel type blade. Then we found fabrication errors and cracks on the top of teeth, and they caused contact probability among fed microparts and feeder surfaces, which affected the feeding stability of microparts. In the present work, we applied the asymmetry etched surface of the [221] oriented single crystal silicon wafer to develop higher accurate and uniform asymmetric fabricated surfaces. The section geometry, the tribology characteristics, and the feeding stability were evaluated among four types of the asymmetry etched silicon wafer pieces we developed in this work. We finally evaluated the stability of micropart feeding on each surface by the particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) method.

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Development of a non-contact conveyance system composed of distributed nozzle units

Cited by 13 publications

References 6 publications

DextAIRity: Deformable Manipulation Can be a Breeze

DextAIRity: Deformable Manipulation Can be a Breeze

Learning Pneumatic Non-Prehensile Manipulation with a Mobile Blower

Improvement of sawtooth shape generated by anisotropic etching process of single-crystal silicon for microparts feeding using horizontal and symmetric vibrations

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