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The Rigid-Bodied Robot

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Comparison of Rigid-Bodied Candidate Robots We require an autonomous mobile robot platform that provides plenty of room to place the pressurized system to control the soft robot. The table below briefly compares the hardware specifications of both the...

The Soft Robot

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The soft robot design cycle followed a "spiral development" process, with a design that evolved according to the needs of the system as a whole and limitations uncovered during testing. As such, our design followed a natural progression, where the...

Task-Level Control of Soft- and Rigid-Body Robot Behaviors

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Camera Integration The ASUS Xtion Pro camera was used for tracking the soft robot and the target object to be retrieved. It provides both RGB and depth data. As pictured below, the camera was mounted on the front of the youBot. The camera could also be...

Fabrication

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This section provides details on the required steps for fabricating the prototype robot. This includes a description of the pneuNet fabrication process, the controller board for the soft robot, and the pneumatic system. The required bill-of-materials for...

PneuNet Actuators

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This section outlines the steps taken in fabricating the PneuNet actuators that make up the legs of the "minion" bot used in our project. The following visualizations are approximate, as the molds used for the different kinds of robots had slightly...

Printed Circuit Board

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A prototype for the electrical system was built on a breadboard for the five-legged designs, using NPN transistors to control the valves and diodes to handle current discharge from the valves. When scaling the design to an eight valve system, the circuit...

Assembly of the Hybrid Robot

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Pneumatic System For the initial testing of the soft robots, a compressed air tank system was used along with a pressure regulator to limit the internal pressure of an existing manifold. A series of three-way solenoid valves connected to the ports of the...

Testing

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Demonstration Day at Cornell University In our last days of working together as a group in person, we demonstrated our results with other research teams in the department. The videos below show our demonstration, annotated slightly for clarity. The...

Controlling the KUKA youBot

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Path Planning with the youBot Manipulator We developed a control program in ROS for automating the KUKA youBot arm. This program takes advantage of the Moveit! ROS package that uses forward and inverse kinematics plan a feasible path for the arm that does...

Controlling the Soft Robot

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Testing Soft Robot Gaits Unless otherwise indicated, all testing described in this section was conducted on a smooth plastic substrate surface on level ground. The rationale for this choice was to provide a surface that allowed for repeated experiments...

FeTCh Mark 1 Manipulator

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Introduction The objective of this project is the design and implementation of a soft manipulator robot based on hybrid actuation capable of interacting with delicate objects and with the ability to team up with humans with safety due to non-hazardous...

Background

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Motivation and inspiration Rigid manipulator robots have, as of this moment, a clear advantage over soft manipulators concerning the force generation and because of their stiff nature, the problem of position control is easily addressed. Nevertheless, the...