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Soft robots have recently demonstrated impressive abilities to adapt to objects and their environment with limited sensing and actuation. However, mobile soft robots are typically fabricated using laborious molding processes that result in limited actuated degrees of freedom and hence limited locomotion capabilities. In this paper, we present a 3D printed robot with bellowed soft legs capable of rotation...
This paper contributes to quantifying the notion of robotic fitness by developing a set of necessary conditions that determine whether a small quadruped has the ability to open a class of doors or climb a class of stairs using only quasi-static maneuvers. After verifying that several such machines from the recent robotics literature are mismatched in this sense to the common human scale environment,...
This paper describes an intuitive method for the design and fabrication of small-scale robots with multi-material compliant mechanisms in 3D. The rigid components are 3D printed, and flexures are inserted into the rigid components, creating the final mechanism. The assembled mechanisms are robust, requiring over 1 N of force to delaminate, and surviving 150,000 cycles of bending without failure. A...
A Spring-Loaded-Inverted Pendulum (SLIP) model has been applied to many legged robots, such as quadruped robots, for realizing trotting, bounding, and galloping motions. The indecipherable damping factors, however, hindered the implementation of the SLIP model in practice. In this paper, a control algorithm is proposed to realize the ideal springy motion of a robotic leg. A Kalman filter with a damped...
Fluidic actuators allow versatile, agile, and powerful motions and are commonly applied in robotics and automation. Likewise, many biological systems use fluidic actuators implemented with tissue for a wealth of tasks and performances. Spiders for example apply a hybrid mechanism of hydraulically actuated joint extension and muscle-based joint flexion to produce movement in two of their seven leg...
Intelligent prosthetics aim to provide a communication channel between disabled people and external world. Among them, walking-assistive device to help people with lower-limb disability attracts attention but still limited by unnatural gait or lack accurate real-time control. Here we studied the coupling between the upper limbs and the lower limbs since the whole body actually involved during walking...
In this paper the robot leg virtual prototype is established through the simulation analysis software, and a feedback control system based on the robot body platform acceleration has been designed to study the strategy for optimizing the stability control of the robot during the walking process. The virtual prototype is imported to MATLAB and the ADRC algorithm is designed to suppress the low frequency...
During robot-assisted dressing, a robot manipulates a garment in contact with a person's body. Inferring the forces applied to the person's body by the garment might enable a robot to provide more effective assistance and give the robot insight into what the person feels. However, complex mechanics govern the relationship between the robot's end effector and these forces. Using a physics-based simulation...
Constraint on the actuation and power resources is often the critical limiting factor for a robot to perform desired tasks. Increasing torque and energy capacity may be a solution, but is seldom viable for robots already built. An attractive alternative is to carefully generate motion trajectories that maximally leverages upon the limited torque and energy resources. In this endeavor, singularity,...
We present an algorithm that generates walking motions for quadruped robots without the use of an explicit footstep planner by simultaneously optimizing over both the Center of Mass (CoM) trajectory and the footholds. Feasibility is achieved by imposing stability constraints on the CoM related to the Zero Moment Point and explicitly enforcing kinematic constraints between the footholds and the CoM...
This paper, for the first time, describes the estimation of the time-varying impedance of the human ankle in the sagittal (SP) and frontal (FP) planes during the stance phase of walking. The result of this work is aimed to provide design parameters for the development of 2-DOF powered ankle-foot prostheses capable of mimicking the time-varying impedance of the human ankle. Sixteen axes of rotations...
In this paper, a knee rehabilitation robot will be developed and controlled. The structure of the system containing the robot and some parts of patient body will be described and modeled using Newton-Euler approach. Two controllers containing Admittance and Sliding-Backstepping are composed to control the system. In this hybrid control scheme, the Sliding-Backstepping controller is considered to track...
The purpose of this study is to develop a handlebar-type interface that detects gait intention in eight directions using eight pressure sensors and to understand walking intention of users based on two scenarios. A walking-assist robot that allows the user to walk using the proposed interface is used. In order to express the dispersive external force as the direction of the quantified force, the proposed...
Current research highlights the emergent need for the development of wearable, calibrated, and accurate sensory systems for ambulatory human gait analysis. The purpose of this work is to develop a lightweight and calibrated instrumented insole system for the real-time monitoring of gait events in healthy, pathological and robotic-assisted gait. We designed the insole with four force sensing resistors...
This system aims to provide force and muscle activation information to assess the biomechanical performance of cane handles using data from gait trials performed by a patient. This device can be used to improve individual prescription of canes or help guide research for the design of more effective and less damaging cane handles.
Continuous Passive Motion (CPM) has been totally accepted as a physical therapy in the recent decades. There have been a number of CPM systems from the most complicated mechatronic systems to the least, developed for this purpose. Despite all improvements in manufacturing such machines, an optimum design needing an acceptably low power for efficient functioning has not yet been targeted. The aim of...
Advancements in robotics are expected to have a profound impact on the economy, industry, jobs, education, health, warfare, space and planetary exploration etc. Progress in fields like Biomechatronics has the potential to further redefine the notion of human identity. An experimental platform for study of a biologically inspired muscular aproach to joint actuation by synthetic Gastrocnemius, Soleus,...
Research of load carriage effect on center of mass(CoM) behavior during human and robot locomotion has been driven by the prevalence of everyday tasks requiring load bearing or transfer. More recently, this has been accentuated in the design of exoskeletons and military backpack systems aimed at assisting with weighty load handling. Despite this importance, complicated body dynamics has stymied the...
We study the acquisition and analysis of sounds generated by the knee during walking with particular focus on the effects due to osteoarthritis. Reliable contact instant estimation is essential for stride synchronous analysis. We present a dynamic programming based algorithm for automatic estimation of both the initial contact instants (ICIs) and last contact instants (LCIs) of the foot to the floor...
In this paper, we study the effect of instructional priming on postural responses to virtual crowds using a headset-based virtual reality (VR) platform. Specifically, we instruct VR participants that one of the virtual agents in a simulated crowd represents the movement of a real person, and reinforce this instruction by having a single role player present in the experimental arena. Our results show...
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