
Departmental Papers (ESE)
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Abstract
We report on experiments with a laptop-sized (0.23m, 2.53kg), paper origami robot that exhibits highly dynamic and stable two degree-of-freedom (circular boom) hopping at speeds in excess of 1.5 bl/s (body-lengths per second) at a specific resistance O(1) while achieving aerial phase apex states 25% above the stance height over thousands of cycles. Three conventional brushless DC motors load energy into the folded paper springs through pulley-borne cables whose sudden loss of tension upon touchdown triggers the release of spring potential that accelerates the body back through liftoff to flight with a 20W powerstroke, whereupon the toe angle is adjusted to regulate fore-aft speed. We also demonstrate in the vertical hopping mode the transparency of this actuation scheme by using proprioceptive contact detection with only motor encoder sensing. The combination of actuation and sensing shows potential to lower system complexity for tendon-driven robots.
For more information: Kod*lab (link to kodlab.seas.upenn.edu)
Sponsor Acknowledgements
This work is supported in part by the Army Research Office (ARO) under the SLICE Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program, award #W911NF1810327 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant #1845339. We thank Young-Joo Lee and Yuchong Gao for their insight in material properties, Jeremy Wang and Yifan Yuan for their help in fabrication, and Shane Rozen-Levy for his consulting on soft robotics literature. We also thank Diedra Krieger for her administrative support.
Document Type
Conference Paper
Subject Area
GRASP, Kodlab
Date of this Version
4-6-2020
Publication Source
2020 3rd IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)
Copyright/Permission Statement
https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/author-posting-policy.html
Keywords
origami, compliant mechanism, dynamic robots, tendon-driven
Date Posted: 25 March 2020
This document has been peer reviewed.