Rapid prototyping design and control of tensegrity soft robot for locomotion

Abstract

Co-robots that can effectively move with and operate alongside humans in a variety of conditions could revolutionize the utility of robots for a wide range of applications. Unfortunately, most current robotic systems have difficulty operating in human environments that people easily traverse, much less interact with people. Wheeled robots have difficulty climbing stairs or going over rough terrain. Heavy and powerful legged robots pose safety risks when interacting with humans. Compliant, lightweight tensegrity robots built from interconnected tensile (cables) and compressive (rods) elements are promising structures for co-robotic applications. This paper describes design and control of a rapidly prototyped tensegrity robot for locomotion. The software and hardware of this robot can be extended to build a wide range of tensegrity robotic configurations and control strategies. This rapid prototyping approach will greatly lower the barrier-of-entry in time and cost for research groups studying tensegrity robots suitable for co-robot applications.

Contest-Driven Soft-Robotics Boost: The RoboSoft Grand Challenge

“…This discipline is steeply growing, and from the seminal review paper of Trivedi et al (2008) the field was subject to several evolutions; to date, the most recent review paper on soft robotics (Rus and Tolley, 2015) identifies four possible application domains for soft robots: locomotion, manipulation, wearable, and soft cyborgs. This review agrees with our survey on the most relevant domains influenced by soft robotic, which identified three niches: (1) the terrestrial locomotion, where a great number of bio-inspired (Belanger et al, 2000;Mezoff et al, 2004;Lin et al, 2013;Umedachi et al, 2016) (inspired by worms, caterpillars, and their gaits) (Jayaram and Full, 2016) (insects) (Chrispell et al, 2013;Cicconofri and DeSimone, 2015) (snakes) or build from scratch robots (Kim et al, 2014;Li et al, 2016) are under development; (2) the underwater locomotion (Fiazza et al, 2010), mainly inspired by fishes (Clark et al, 2015), turtles (Song et al, 2016), crabs (Calisti et al, 2016), chephalopods (Arienti et al, 2013;Cianchetti et al, 2015), rays (Urai et al, 2015), or other aquatic animals; and (3) manipulation, either at the level of grippers (Manti et al, 2015;Fakhari et al, 2016;Shintake et al, 2016), arms Elango and Faudzi, 2015;Katzschmann et al, 2015;Deashapriya et al, 2016;Sun et al, 2016), or other devices (Deng et al, 2016).…”

“…Soft robotics includes very different technological solutions, exploiting e.g., shape memory alloys (Seok et al, 2013), silicone rubber and pneumatic actuation (Shepherd et al, 2011), tendon-driven actuation (Arienti et al, 2013), tensegrity mechanisms (Kim et al, 2014), vibration and deformation of alloys (Yu and Iida, 2014), granular jamming (Steltz et al, 2009), and many more, thus, that a focused definition would also be arduous. Instead, we pushed on the capabilities which we consider fundamental for the soft robots, namely resilience, mechanical compliance, and delicate interaction with the environment, together with strength and dexterity.…”

Inclined surface locomotion strategies for spherical tensegrity robots

“…The natural compliance and reduced failure modes of tensegrity structures have motivated the development of multiple tensegrity robot forms [1]. Some examples include spherical robots designed for locomotion on rugged terrain [4], [5], [6], snakelike robots that crawl along the ground [7], and assistive elements in walking quadrupedal robots [8], [9], [10].…”

Dialectic Form Finding of Structurally Integrated Adaptive Structures

“…Elements are combined in a self-equilibrated pre-stressed state that provides stability and stiffness to the structure. The tensegrity concept exists for almost 60 years now and has received significant interest from scientists and engineers (Munghan and Abel, 2011;Rhode-Barbarigos et al, 2012a;Ingber et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2014) especially for adaptive/shape-changing applications as actuators and structural elements can be combined (structurally integrated actuation) (Adam and Smith, 2008;Veuve et al, 2015). Tensegrity structures have been traditionally developed and analyzed using formfinding methods in which bilateral rigidity elements are modeled as truss elements (elements experiencing tension or compression).…”