CurveQuad Origami Quadruped: IROS 2023 Video Attachment (Extended) @sungroboticsgroup

Sung Robotics Group Extended version of the video attachment from:
Feshbach, Daniel; Wu, Xuelin; Vasireddy, Satviki; Beardell, Louis; To, Bao; Baryshnikov, Yuliy; Sung, Cynthia. "CurveQuad: A Centimeter-Scale Origami Quadruped that Leverages Curved Creases to Self-Fold and Crawl with One Motor", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023, doi: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342339.

Publisher source: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10342339
Paper available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/58861
Fabrication files at: https://sung.seas.upenn.edu/publications/curvequad/

updated 1 year ago

CurveQuad Origami Quadruped: IROS 2023 Video Attachment (Extended)

Sung Robotics Group 2023-08-23 | Extended version of the video attachment from:
Feshbach, Daniel; Wu, Xuelin; Vasireddy, Satviki; Beardell, Louis; To, Bao; Baryshnikov, Yuliy; Sung, Cynthia. "CurveQuad: A Centimeter-Scale Origami Quadruped that Leverages Curved Creases to Self-Fold and Crawl with One Motor", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023, doi: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342339.

Publisher source: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10342339
Paper available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/58861
Fabrication files at: https://sung.seas.upenn.edu/publications/curvequad/

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Foldable Display

Sung Robotics Group 2024-07-31 | Gabriel Unger, Cynthia R. Sung. “Re-programmable Matter by Folding: Magnetically-Controlled Origami that Self-Folds, Self-Unfolds, and Self-Reconfigures On-Demand” Origami 8: Eighth International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education, 2024.

Want to learn more about our work? Check out the open access version at: https://repository.upenn.edu/entities/publication/18d39cb9-f453-4cc7-9a68-47ddcc4a2924

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Folding and Unfolding

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Self-Folding Airplane (Dithered)

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Airplane from Universal Fold Pattern

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Self-Folding Airplane

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Self-Folding Cup

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Self-Folding Boat

Reprogramable Matter By Folding: Fabrication of Magnetic Laminate

Bistable Aerial Transformer: Quadrotor Fixed-Wing Hybrid that Morphs Dynamically via Soft Mechanism

Sung Robotics Group 2024-03-22 | Title: Bistable Aerial Transformer (BAT): A Quadrotor Fixed-Wing Hybrid that Morphs Dynamically via
Passive Soft Mechanism

Authors: Jessica Weakly, Xuan Li, Tejas Agarwal, Minchen Li, Spencer Folk, Chenfanfu Jiang, and Cynthia Sung

Abstract: Aerial vehicle missions require navigating trade-offs during design, such as the range, speed, maneuverabil-
ity, and size. Multi-modal aerial vehicles enable this trade-off to be negotiated during flight. This paper presents
a Bistable Aerial Transformer (BAT) robot, a novel morphing hybrid aerial vehicle (HAV) that switches between
quadrotor and fixed-wing modes via rapid acceleration and without any additional actuation beyond those required
for normal flight. The design features a compliant bistable mechanism made of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU)
that bears a large mass at the center of the robot’s body. When accelerating, inertial forces transition the vehicle be-
tween its stable modes, and a four-bar linkage connected to the bistable mechanism folds the vehicle’s wings in and
out. The paper includes the full robot design and a comparison of the fabricated system to the elastodynamic simu-
lation. Successful transitions between the two modes in mid-flight, as well as sustained flight in each mode indicate
that the vehicle experiences higher agility in the quadrotor mode and higher flight efficiency in the fixed-wing mode,
at an energy equivalent cost of only 2 s of flight time per pair of transitions. The vehicle demonstrates how compli-
ant and bistable mechanisms can be integrated into future aerial vehicles for controllable self-reconfiguration for
tasks such as surveillance and sampling that require a combination of maneuverability and long-distance flight.

Full paper doi: doi.org/10.1115/1.4065159

Online Optimization of Soft Manipulator Mechanics via Hierarchical Control

Sung Robotics Group 2024-03-11 | Supplemental Video for:
Misra, Shivangi, and Sung, Cynthia. "Online Optimization of Soft Manipulator Mechanics via Hierarchical Control." IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), 2024.

Abstract:
Actively tuning mechanical properties in soft robots is now feasible due to advancements in soft actuation technologies. In soft manipulators, these novel actuators can be distributed over the robot body to allow greater control over its large number of degrees of freedom and to stabilize local deformations against a range of disturbances. In this paper, we present a hierarchical policy for stiffness control for such a class of soft manipulators. The stiffness changes induce desired deformations in each segment, thereby influencing the manipulator’s end-effector position. The algorithm can be run as an online controller to influence the manipulator’s stable states – as we demonstrate in simulation – or offline as a design algorithm to optimize stiffness distributions – as we showcase in a hardware demonstration. Our proposed hierarchical control scheme is agnostic to the stiffness actuation method and can extend to other soft manipulators with nonuniform stiffness distributions.

Origami-Inspired Bistable Gripper with Self-Sensing Capabilities (Robosoft 2024)

Sung Robotics Group 2024-03-08 | Supplementary video attachment from:
Kim, Christopher; Yang, Lele; Anbuchelvan, Ashwath; Garg, Raghav; Milbar, Niv; Vitale, Flavia; Sung, Cynthia "Origami-Inspired Bistable Gripper with Self-Sensing Capabilitie", 7th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (Robosoft) 2024

Design and Control of a Tunable-Stiffness Coiled-Spring Actuator

Sung Robotics Group 2023-03-06 | Supplemental Video for:
Misra, Shivangi, Mitchell, Mason, Chen, Rongqian, and Sung, Cynthia. "Design and Control of a Tunable-Stiffness Coiled-Spring Actuator." IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023.

Abstract:
We propose a novel design for a lightweight and compact tunable stiffness actuator capable of stiffness changes up to 20x. The design is based on the concept of a coiled spring, where changes in the number of layers in the spring change the bulk stiffness in a near-linear fashion. We present an elastica nested rings model for the deformation of the proposed actuator and empirically verify that the designed stiffness-changing spring abides by this model. Using the resulting model, we design a physical prototype of the tunable-stiffness coiled-spring actuator and discuss the effect of design choices on the resulting achievable stiffness range and resolution. In the future, this actuator design could be useful in a wide variety of soft robotics applications, where fast, controllable, and local stiffness change is required over a large range of stiffnesses.

Link to paper: https://repository.upenn.edu/grasp_papers/72/

Build-a-Bot demo (ICRA 2022 Expo)

Sung Robotics Group 2023-03-01 | Demonstration and explanation of Build-a-Bot software used for user studies at ICRA 2022.

Related work: Schulz, Adriana, Sung, Cynthia, Spielberg, Andrew, Zhao, Wei, Cheng, Yu, Grinspun, Eitan, Rus, Daniela, and Matusik, Wojciech. "Interactive Robogami: An end-to-end system for design of robots with ground locomotion." International Journal of Robotics Research 36.10: 1131-1147, 2017.
dx.doi.org/10.1177/0278364917723465

EvoRobogami: Co-designing with Humans in Evolutionary Robotics - Supplemental Video

Sung Robotics Group 2023-03-01 | Supplemental Video for:
Huang, Zonghao, Wu, Quinn, Howard, David, and Sung, Cynthia. "EvoRobogami: Co-designing with Humans in Evolutionary Robotics Experiments." Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), 2022.

Abstract:
We study the effects of injecting human-generated designs into the initial population of an evolutionary robotics experiment, where subsequent generations of robots are optimised via a Genetic Algorithm and MAP-Elites. First, human participants interact via a graphical front-end to explore a directly-parameterised legged robot design space and attempt to produce robots via a combination of intuition and trial-and-error that perform well in a range of environments. Environments are generated whose corresponding high-performance robot designs range from intuitive to complex and hard to grasp. Once the human designs have been collected, their impact on the evolutionary process is assessed by replacing a varying number of designs in the initial population with human designs and subsequently running the evolutionary algorithm. Our results suggest that a balance of random and hand-designed initial solutions provides best performance for the problems considered, and that human designs are most valuable when the problem is intuitive. The influence of human design in an evolutionary algorithm is a highly understudied area, and the insights provided in this paper may be valuable to those in the area of AI-based design more generally.

Paper can be found at: arxiv.org/abs/2205.08086

Repeated jumping with the REBOund

Sung Robotics Group 2022-05-04 | Experimental footage from:
Sun*, Yuchen; Wang*, Joanna; Sung, Cynthia. "Repeated jumping with the REBOund: Self-righting jumping robot leveraging bistable origami-inspired design" IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022, (* = co-first author).

Abstract: Repeated jumping is crucial to the mobility of jumping robots. In this paper, we extend upon the REBOund jumping robot design, an origami-inspired jumping robot that uses the Reconfigurable Expanding Bistable Origami (REBO) pattern as its body. The robot design takes advantage of the pattern's bistability to jump with controllable timing. For jump repeatedly, we also add self-righting legs that utilize a single motor actuation mechanism. We describe a dynamic model that captures the compression of the REBO pattern and the REBOund self-righting process and compared it to the physical robot. Our experiments show that the REBOund is able to successfully self-right and jump repeatedly over tens of jumps.

Supplemental Video: Repeated jumping with the REBOund

Sung Robotics Group 2022-05-04 | Supplemental video for:
Sun*, Yuchen; Wang*, Joanna; Sung, Cynthia. "Repeated jumping with the REBOund: Self-righting jumping robot leveraging bistable origami-inspired design." IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022, (* = co-first author).

Abstract: Repeated jumping is crucial to the mobility of jumping robots. In this paper, we extend upon the REBOund jumping robot design, an origami-inspired jumping robot that uses the Reconfigurable Expanding Bistable Origami (REBO) pattern as its body. The robot design takes advantage of the pattern's bistability to jump with controllable timing. For jump repeatedly, we also add self-righting legs that utilize a single motor actuation mechanism. We describe a dynamic model that captures the compression of the REBO pattern and the REBOund self-righting process and compared it to the physical robot. Our experiments show that the REBOund is able to successfully self-right and jump repeatedly over tens of jumps.

TrussBot: Modeling, design and control of a compliant, helical truss of tetrahedral modules

Sung Robotics Group 2022-05-04 | Short presentation for:
Qin*, Yuhong; Ting*, Linda; Saven*, Celestina; Amemiya, Yumika; Tanis, Michael; Kamien, Randall; Sung, Cynthia. "TrussBot: Modeling, design and control of a compliant, helical truss of tetrahedral modules." IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2022, (*=co-first author).

Abstract: Modular and truss robots offer the potential of high reconfigurability and great functional flexibility, but common implementations relying on rigid components often lead to highly complex actuation and control requirements. This paper introduces a new type of modular, compliant robot: TrussBot. TrussBot is composed of 3D-printed tetrahedral modules connected at the corners with compliant joints. We propose a truss geometry, analyze its deformation modes, and provide a simulation framework for predicting its behavior under applied loads and actuation. The TrussBot is geometrically constrained, thus requiring compliant joints to move. The TrussBot can be actuated through a network of tendons which pinch vertices together and apply a twisting motion due to the structure's connectivity. The truss was demonstrated in a physical prototype and compared to simulation results.

TrussBot: Modeling, Design, and Control of a Compliant, Helical Truss of Tetrahedral Modules

Sung Robotics Group 2022-05-04 | Supplemental video for:
Qin*, Yuhong; Ting*, Linda; Saven*, Celestina; Amemiya, Yumika; Tanis, Michael; Kamien, Randall; Sung, Cynthia. "TrussBot: Modeling, design and control of a compliant, helical truss of tetrahedral modules." IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2022, (*=co-first author).

Abstract: Modular and truss robots offer the potential of high reconfigurability and great functional flexibility, but common implementations relying on rigid components often lead to highly complex actuation and control requirements. This paper introduces a new type of modular, compliant robot: TrussBot. TrussBot is composed of 3D-printed tetrahedral modules connected at the corners with compliant joints. We propose a truss geometry, analyze its deformation modes, and provide a simulation framework for predicting its behavior under applied loads and actuation. The TrussBot is geometrically constrained, thus requiring compliant joints to move. The TrussBot can be actuated through a network of tendons which pinch vertices together and apply a twisting motion due to the structure's connectivity. The truss was demonstrated in a physical prototype and compared to simulation results.

Forward Kinematics and Control of a Segmented Tunable-Stiffness 3-D Continuum Manipulator: Results

Sung Robotics Group 2022-04-22 | Shivangi Misra and Cynthia Sung. Published in ICRA 2022.

Link to paper: https://repository.upenn.edu/grasp_papers/69/
This is the supplemental video attachment submitted with the paper.

Recommended citation:
S. Misra and C. Sung, "Forward Kinematics and Control of a Tunable-Stiffness 3-D Continuum
Manipulator," 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022.

Forward Kinematics and Control of a Segmented Tunable-Stiffness 3-D Continuum Manipulator

Sung Robotics Group 2022-04-22 | Shivangi Misra and Cynthia Sung. Prerecorded presentation for ICRA 2022.

In this work, we consider the problem of controlling the end effector position of a continuum manipulator through local stiffness changes. Continuum manipulators offer the advantage of continuous deformation along their lengths, and recent advances in smart material actuators further enable local compliance changes, which can affect the manipulator's bulk motion. However, leveraging local stiffness change to control motion remains lightly explored. We build a kinematic model of a continuum manipulator as a sequence of segments consisting of symmetrically arranged springs around the perimeter of every segment, and we show that this system has a closed form solution to its forward kinematics. The model includes common constraints such as restriction of torsional or shearing movement. Based on this model, we propose a controller on the spring stiffnesses for a single segment and provide provable guarantees on convergence to a desired goal position. The results are verified in simulation and compared to physical hardware.

Link to paper: https://repository.upenn.edu/grasp_papers/69/
Recommended Citation:
S. Misra and C. Sung, "Forward Kinematics and Control of a Tunable-Stiffness 3-D Continuum Manipulator," 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022.

Reconfiguring Non-Convex Holes in Pivoting Modular Cube Robots: IROS 2021 prerecorded presentation.

Sung Robotics Group 2021-09-10 | Daniel Feshbach and Cynthia Sung. Prerecorded presentation for IROS 2021.

Paper pdf can be found at ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9477019

Paper citation:
D. Feshbach and C. Sung, "Reconfiguring Non-Convex Holes in Pivoting Modular Cube Robots," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2021.3095030.

Origami-Inspired Robot that Swims via Jet Propulsion

Sung Robotics Group 2021-07-21 | Z. Yang, D. Chen, D. Levine and C. Sung, "Origami-Inspired Robot that Swims via Jet Propulsion," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2021.3097757.
dx.doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2021.3097757

We demonstrate an origami-inspired robot that can change its body shape to ingest and expel water, creating a jet that propels it forward similarly to cephalopods. The video shows the internal actuation mechanism for the robot, the robot working in the air, and a video of one of our experimental trials with the robot in the water. The robot is able to move forward at 6.7 cm/s (0.2 body lengths/s), with a cost of transport of 2.0.

Reconfiguring Non-Convex Holes in Pivoting Modular Cube Robots

Sung Robotics Group 2021-06-28 | Daniel Feshbach and Cynthia Sung. Supplementary video for IROS 2021 and RA-L.
Preprint can be found at https://repository.upenn.edu/cis_papers/865/

Paper citation:
D. Feshbach and C. Sung, "Reconfiguring Non-Convex Holes in Pivoting Modular Cube Robots," in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2021.3095030.

Fabrication and Characterization of I-cord Knitted SMA Actuators

Sung Robotics Group 2021-03-24 | Christopher Kim, Athena Chien, Megha Tippur, Cynthia Sung

Knitted SMA actuators provide greater actuation stroke than single-strand SMA wire actuators by leveraging its knitted structure. However, due to short-circuiting through interlacing knit loops, existing knitted SMA sheet actuators are unsuitable for joule-heating actuation when uniform contractile actuation is desired. We explore an axially symmetric tubular i-cord knitted actuator as a possible solution. The fabrication process of an i-cord knitted SMA actuator and its electrical, thermal, and mechanics models are presented. After modifying existing models for single-strand SMA wire and adjusting their parameters, the proposed electrical, thermal, and mechanics models were verified with experimental results.

Push-on Push-off: A Compliant Bistable Gripper with Mechanical Sensing and Actuation

Sung Robotics Group 2021-03-15 | Jessica McWilliams, Yifan Yuan, Jason Friedman, and Cynthia Sung

The bistable gripper is able to grasp and release objects using mechanical sensing and actuation. It does not require any motors or pnuematics. In this video we demonstrate the fabricated Compliant Bistable Gripper with Mechanical Sensing and Actuation successfully grasping and releasing objects. We discuss the functionality of the mechanism and the methodology used in designing it. The videos from the compression tests used to validate the results of our simulation are included.

The preprint is available on Scholarly Commons