Low-Cost Wireless Modular Soft Tensegrity Robots

Kimber, Jonathan; Ji, Zongliang; Petridou, Aikaterini; Sipple, Thomas; Barhydt, Kentaro; Boggs, James; Dosiek, Luke; Rieffel, John

doi:10.1109/robosoft.2019.8722723

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Earlier work of ours also demonstrates how machine learning algorithms can be used to optimize gaits for the robot across level terrain [28]- [30]. During this prior work we observed that the robot is actually capable of a wide variety of translational and rotational behaviors and that the nonlinearity of the system means that the changes are consistent across trials and yet non-intuitive.…”

Section: A Tensegrity-based Soft Robotsmentioning

confidence: 61%

“…In prior work, we describe the design of a relatively inexpensive and tether-free soft tensegrity robot [28] (Fig. 1).…”

Section: A Tensegrity-based Soft Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Small changes to the motor speeds of our robot can produce profound and unexpected changes in behavior -for instance a switch from forward locomotion mode to a purely rotational mode. Recent work of ours optimized a single behavior such as forward locomotion [28], [36], however, these methods by nature discard interesting behaviors that are non-optimal in regards to a single fitness function but that might otherwise be useful in some other context -for instance rotation, or a behavior that mixes rotation and translation. Indeed, in our earlier approaches to optimizing locomotion we discarded any behavior that produced any gaits that happened to also rotate the robot outside of a narrow window of angles.…”

Section: Behavioral Repertoires For Tensegrity Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Behavioral Repertoires for Soft Tensegrity Robots

Doney¹,

Petridou²,

Karaul³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Section: A Tensegrity-based Soft Robotsmentioning

confidence: 61%

“…In prior work, we describe the design of a relatively inexpensive and tether-free soft tensegrity robot [28] (Fig. 1).…”

Section: A Tensegrity-based Soft Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Behavioral Repertoires For Tensegrity Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Behavioral Repertoires for Soft Tensegrity Robots

Doney¹,

Petridou²,

Karaul³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…As a result, a tensegrity structure can withstand force and impact from different directions, and return to the equilibrium position, which can be summarized as structural compliance. Additionally, the rigidity of a tensegrity can be easily adjusted by changing the tension within the network [9]. Tensegrity structures have been used in bionic shoulders [10], elbows [11], knees [12] and wrists [13,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A wrist-inspired suspended tubercle-type tensegrity joint with variable stiffness capacity

2022

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In complex and unpredictable environments or in situations of human-robot interaction, a soft and flexible robot performs more safely and impact resistant compared to a traditional rigid robot. To enable the robot with the bionic features (flexibility, compliance and variable stiffness) similar to human joints, structures involving suspended tubercle tensegrity is researched. The suspended tubercle gives the joint compliance and flexibility by isolating two moving parts. The variable stiffness capacity is achieved by changing the internal stress of tensegrity through the simultaneous contraction or relaxation of the driving tendons. A wrist-inspired tensegrity based bionic joint is proposed as a case study. It has variable stiffness and two rotations with a total of three degrees of freedom. Through theoretical derivation and simulation calculation in NTRTsim, the range of motion, stiffness adjustable capacity, and their interaction are studied. A prototype is built and tested under a motion capture system. The experimental result agrees well with the theoretical simulation. Our experiments show that the suspended tubercle type tensegrity is flexible, stiffness adjustable and easy to control and has great potential for bionic joints.

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“…These properties include low weight, resistance to damage from collisions, the ability to control the stiffness of the structures, and the ability to control the deformation of the robot [see Liu et al (2022) for a review of other properties of the tensegrity structures]. The latter properties motivate the interest in tensegrity as a structural element of soft robots [ Lee et al (2020) ; Rieffel and Mouret (2018) ; Kimber et al (2019) ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphing-Enabled Path Planning for Flying Tensegrity Robots as a Semidefinite Program

Савин

Klimchik

2022

Front. Robot. AI

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The development of deformable drones is of high importance but presents significant challenges. Such drones can be based on tensegrity structures, which leaves open the questions of configuration-space path planning for such robots. In this paper we propose a method that takes advantage of a simplified encoding of the drone’s shape, allowing to turn the path planning into a sequence of semidefinite programs. The mapping from the simplified description and the actual tensegrity configuration is done via a data-driven method, using a pre-computed dataset of statically stable configurations and their outer Löwner-John ellipsoids, as well as eigendecompositions of the ellipsoid matrices. Together it allows rapid containment check, whose computational cost depends linearly on the number of dataset entries. Thus, the proposed method offloads computationally-intensive parts to the offline dataset generation procedure, speeding up the algorithm execution.

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Low-Cost Wireless Modular Soft Tensegrity Robots

Cited by 17 publications

References 31 publications

Behavioral Repertoires for Soft Tensegrity Robots

Behavioral Repertoires for Soft Tensegrity Robots

A wrist-inspired suspended tubercle-type tensegrity joint with variable stiffness capacity

Morphing-Enabled Path Planning for Flying Tensegrity Robots as a Semidefinite Program

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