We are excited to share a new curved-crease origami design for a crawling robot that self-folds, crawls and steers, and unfolds back into a flat state, all using a single actuator.
Alec Lanter and Rongqian Chen completed MS thesis in our group and have graduated with their MS degrees. Good luck on your next steps!
Congrats to Shivangi, Mason, and Rongqian on their ICRA paper!
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.
We are also excited to announce a workshop on Origami-based Structures for Designing Soft Robots with New Capabilities, which will be held on Monday, May 29.
More info at: https://www.origabot.cnrs.fr/workshop-icra-2023/
Cynthia Sung received a 2023 ONR Young Investigator Award to work on “Salp-Inspired Reconfigurable Robot Platform for Long-Term Distributed Sensing.” We are so excited to work on this project with program manager Dr. Tom McKenna!
https://www.nre.navy.mil/2023-young-investigators
Related publication:
We’re excited to be a part of Penn’s new exciting Center for Soft and Living Matter, under the direction of Prof. Andrew Liu (Physics & Astronomy). Check out this website for information and updates!
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/slm/