Design and Analysis of a Robust, Low-cost, Highly Articulated manipulator enabled by jamming of granular media

By N. Cheng, M. Lobovsky, Steven J. Keating, A. Setapen, Katy Ilonka Gero, Anette E. Hosoi, K. Iagnemma. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Hyper-redundant manipulators can be fragile, expensive, and limited in their flexibility due to the distributed and bulky actuators that are typically used to achieve the precision and degrees of freedom (DOFs) required. Here, a manipulator is proposed that is robust, high-force, low-cost, and highly articulated without employing traditional actuators mounted at the manipulator joints. Rather, local tunable stiffness is coupled with off-board spooler motors and tension cables to achieve complex manipulator configurations. Tunable stiffness is achieved by reversible jamming of granular media, which-by applying a vacuum to enclosed grains-causes the grains to transition between solid-like states and liquid-like ones. Experimental studies were conducted to identify grains with high strength-to-weight performance. A prototype of the manipulator is presented with performance analysis, with emphasis on speed, strength, and articulation. This novel design for a manipulator-and use of jamming for robotic applications in general-could greatly benefit applications such as human-safe robotics and systems in which robots need to exhibit high flexibility to conform to their environments.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c491d97bdd8b6c05b616dbcd37abbb48e9425cec

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In Biomedical Engineering

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In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

A Novel Layer Jamming Mechanism With Tunable Stiffness Capability for Minimally Invasive Surgery (2013, background): “, dry sand or coffee), it can effectively transition between a fluid-like, compliant state, and a solid-like, stiff state if, for instance, a vacuum is applied on the volume such that the grains pack together to “jam” and develop a yield stress [11].”
Continuous Backbone “ Continuum ” Robot Manipulators : A Review (2013, unknown): “A prototype tendon-driven continuum robot using granular jamming for variable stiffness is demonstrated in [72].”
Controllable and reversible tuning of material rigidity for robot applications (2018, background): “Another application of particle jamming is the articulated cable-driven manipulator reported by [66].”
Stiffening in Soft Robotics: A Review of the State of the Art (2016, background): “[32] developed a robust, modular, and highly articulated manipulator that utilizes jam ming of granular media for achieving local stiffness control, while actuation cables along the robotic manipulator allow the control of its shape and position [Figure 3(b)].”
Soft Robotics: New Perspectives for Robot Bodyware and Control (2014, unknown): “…can be used for robot locomotion and grasping: while the material properties can be changed with granular jamming (determining anisotropies), motion can be generated with pneumatic actuators or with cable-driven systems as in the case of the MIT jammable manipulator (Cheng et al., 2012).”
Continuum Robots for Medical Applications: A Survey (2015, background): “Some unique variable stiffness backbone designs have also been investigated recently that use layer jamming [49],[49] grannular jamming [50], [51], and rollingcontact joints for pseudocontinuum robots [41].”