Design and control of soft shape-changing robots
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- For robots to be useful in the real world, they must be human-safe, adaptable to different tasks, robust to uncertainty, and untethered from external power. Enabling these capabilities requires the codesign of both the physical robot and its controller. In this talk, I will illustrate this approach through the development of a large-scale, shape-changing, inflated soft robot. First, I will describe the control of robotic trusses, or robots that consist of many linear actuators connected at universal joints to form a shape-changing structure. Using techniques from rigidity theory, I present a kinematic model and control methodology that enables control of arbitrary structures. Then, I will demonstrate these controllers in practice for a new type of inflated truss robot called an "Isoperimetric" Truss Robot, or a truss in which the total edge length is conserved. In this case, the vertices of the truss-structure consist of robotic rollers that pinch inflated fabric tubes that comprise the robot's structure, inducing effective joints. The robot changes its shape by driving the rollers along the tube, lengthening one edge and shortening another by moving the joint. As the overall edge length, and hence inflated volume, remains constant no tether to external air is required. The resultant robot can locomote with a punctuated rolling gait, grasp objects using its inherent compliance, operate safely around humans, and can be manually reconfigured based on its task. Last, I will present a distributed control framework for truss-like robots. In this framework each individual actuator utilizes local computation and communication to determine how to act individually to allow the overall robot to accomplish a task. Together these contributions allow for modular, human-safe robots that are capable of controllably changing their shape
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Usevitch, Nathan Scot |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Okamura, Allison |
| Degree supervisor | Schwager, Mac |
| Thesis advisor | Okamura, Allison |
| Thesis advisor | Schwager, Mac |
| Thesis advisor | Follmer, Sean |
| Degree committee member | Follmer, Sean |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nathan Usevitch |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Nathan Scot Usevitch
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...