Miscellaneous

University of Idaho Capstone Design Project 2010-2011. The senior design team named Tensegriteam designed and built this 6-bar Tensegrity robot. It is actuated by 12 servo motors mounted on plates at its top and bottom and controlled using a Parallax Propeller Proto board and Matlab interface.

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On going research at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL into the design of Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra (Morphs)

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Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these same properties in order to create resilient machines. The nature of soft materials, however, presents considerable challenges to aspects of design, construction, and control -- and up until now, the vast majority of gaits for soft robots have been hand-designed through empirical trial-and-error. This manuscript describes an easy-to-assemble tensegrity-based soft robot capable of highly dynamic locomotive gaits and demonstrating structural and behavioral resilience in the face of physical damage. Enabling this is the use of a machine learning algorithm able to discover novel gaits with a minimal number of physical trials. These results lend further credence to soft-robotic approaches that seek to harness the interaction of complex material dynamics in order to generate a wealth of dynamical behaviors.

Paper:

"Adaptive and Resilient Soft Tensegrity Robots"

by John Rieffel, Jean-Baptiste Mouret
(Submitted on 10 Feb 2017 (v1), last revised 19 Feb 2018

Reference:
Rieffel, J. and Mouret, J.-.B (2018). Adaptive and Resilient Soft Tensegrity Robots. Soft Robotics. Vol 5, No 3.

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Suzumori Endo Lab, Tokyo Tech has developed soft tensegrity robot driven by thin artificial muscles.

Project members:
Ryota Kobayashi, Hiroyuki Nabae, Kazuki Shishikura, Naomi Suzuki,Gen Endo and Koichi Suzumori

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