Adaptive and Resilient Soft Tensegrity Robots
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 effective 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.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Sim2Sim Evaluation of a Novel Data-Efficient Differentiable Physics Engine for Tensegrity Robots
Learning policies in simulation is promising for reducing human effort when training robot controllers. This is especially true for soft robots that are more adaptive and safe but also more difficult to accurately model …
MuJoCoTensegrity Robot Endcap-Ground Contact Estimation with Symmetry-aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network
Tensegrity robots possess lightweight and resilient structures but present significant challenges for state estimation due to compliant and distributed ground contacts. This paper introduces a symmetry-aware heterogeneou…
Graph Neural NetworkPose EstimationBehavioral Repertoires for Soft Tensegrity Robots
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materi…
Diversity6N-DoF Pose Tracking for Tensegrity Robots
Tensegrity robots, which are composed of compressive elements (rods) and flexible tensile elements (e.g., cables), have a variety of advantages, including flexibility, low weight, and resistance to mechanical impact. Nev…
Pose EstimationPose TrackingState EstimationDon't Just Search, Understand: Semantic Path Planning Agent for Spherical Tensegrity Robots in Unknown Environments
Endowed with inherent dynamical properties that grant them remarkable ruggedness and adaptability, spherical tensegrity robots stand as prototypical examples of hybrid softrigid designs and excellent mobile platforms. Ho…