The SATA-Drive: A Modular Robotic Drive for Reusable Steerable Laparoscopic Instruments

Introduction: Most robotic instruments and their drives still risk residual contamination due to cleaning complexities, rendering them limited reusable, and tend to have larger instruments than the 5mm laparoscopic standard. The novel steerable laparoscopic SATA-LRS uses modularity for cleanability and exchangeability. The SATA-Drive: a...

Robotic Grasping of Vine Tomatoes: A Learning Approach

A semi-autonomous adaptive impedance grip force controller for teleoperated object grasping

While defusing a bomb or performing a rescue mission with a teleoperated robot, grasping various objects is crucial. Despite being a routine activity, remote grasping is still challenging. It is difficult to apply an adequate grip force to avoid slippage and damage to an object. An additional challenge is controlling both motion and force at the...

Design And Evaluation Of A Balanced Compliant Laparoscopic Grasper

In laparoscopic surgery, quality of haptic feedback is reduced compared to conventional surgery, leading to unintentional tissue damage during grasping. From the perspective of haptics, poor mechanical design of laparoscopic instrument joints induces friction and a nonlinear actuation-tip force relation. In this study, a novel laparoscopic...

Design and evaluation of a gripper for bunches of bananas in a supermarket environment

In this paper the first gripper that can grasp bunches of bananas is presented. Bunches of bananas are difficult to grasp by a mechanical gripper, as they vary in size and shape and are sensitive to damage caused by mechanical impact. In former research, single bananas have been grasped with pinching- or granular grippers. The gripper proposed...

Grasp-RCNN for a two-fingered pinch-gripper: A multiple RCNN approach

<b>Introduction </b>- Grasping unknown objects is an important ability for robots in logistic environments. While humans have an excellent understanding of how to grasp objects because of their visual perception and understanding of the 3D world, robotic grasping is still a challenge. Due to the fast-growing development of deep learning methods,...

Map-Grasp: A deep learning approach to bin-picking

Automated bin-picking is a difficult task that requires solving multiple robotic vision problems including object detection and grasp proposal generation. Current methods use deep learning to approach each of the vision problems of bin-picking separately with the main focus on generating the grasp proposals. For grasp proposal generation, neural...

Global Grasp Planning for On-Orbit Robotic Manipulation: Design of an analytic grasp planning engine for autonomous capture of novel objects

To manage the increasing amount of satellite traffic in orbit and renewed operational ambitions, it is crucial to advance the capabilities of space robotic systems to enable complex manipulability tasks. These abilities will provide the necessary components to perform satellite de-orbiting, servicing of important assets, and assistance in on...

Teaching Robots How to Grasp Like Humans by Humans: An Interactive Approach

Grasping objects in a smooth humanlike motion, instead of the more typical pick-and-place approach, includes multiple aspects that need to be performed correctly for a successful grasp. These aspects involve moving the end-effector such that its surface makes and retains contact with the object while also coordinating the movement of the gripper...

Robotic Grasping of Deformable Food Objects: A Human-Inspired Reinforcement Learning Approach

There are many stages that involve humans handling food objects in the processing chains from farms to stores. For some of these tasks it is desirable to look for a robotic solution to either assist the human or even take over that task, e.g. if it is physically demanding, imposes contamination risks or because of economical considerations....

Quantifying Feedback Modality Contributions for a Haptic Glove in VR Assembly

An integral part of creating compelling and useful immersive virtual environments is the presence of haptic feedback, where both kinesthetic and cutaneous feedback convey unique information critical to object handling and manipulation. State-of-the-art haptic gloves are broadening the workspace and degrees of freedom for hand motion in VR,...

Workspace Extension in Shoulder Elevation/-Protraction Actuated, By-Wire Controlled Grasping and Squeezing in a Virtual Environment

Many users of body-powered upper extremity prostheses experience difficulties using their device and a large group abandons usage altogether. Shoulder control via Bowden cable is widely used because of the intuitive use and low cost, but requires large shoulder movements and high operating forces that, according to literature, often exceed the...

Suction Grasp Pose Planning Using Self-supervision and Transfer Learning

Planning grasp poses for a robot on unknown objects in cluttered environments is still an open problem. Recent research suggests that deep learning technique is a promising approach to plan grasp poses on unknown objects in cluttered environments. In this field, three types of data are used for training: (a) human labeled data; (b) synthetic...

Control Strategies for Grasping and Holding Deformable Items Using a Gripper on a Robotic Arm

Because of the increasing e-commerce volume, resulting in increasing demands on the speed of delivery, logistical processes become more and more automated. Order picking is one of the last tasks that is done by humans in warehouses, because humans are flexible with respect to the large variability and changeability in items. However, it is a...

Learning Autonomous Grasping Strategies for a Care Robot: A Machine Learning approach

Autonomous grasping is a key requisite for the autonomy of robots.<br/>However, grasping of unknown objects in domestic environments is difficult due to the presence of unpredictability and clutter.<br/>In this paper, a novel algorithm capable of finding an unobstructed grasping pose on unknown regular object shapes in cluttered environments is...