Malleable Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces malleable robots with adjustable stiffness architectures that aim to enhance dexterity and flexibility in manufacturing, reducing the need for high-DOF arms for complex tasks.

Contribution

It presents the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction for malleable robots, a new type of collaborative robot with adaptable stiffness for improved dexterity.

Findings

Malleable robots can achieve high dexterity with fewer actuators.

Adjustable stiffness allows for flexible task adaptation.

Potential to bridge the gap between current cobots and flexible manufacturing.

Abstract

This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for achieving high dexterity with lower mobility arms. Collaborative robots, or cobots, commonly integrate six or more degrees of freedom (DOF) in a serial arm in order to allow positioning in constrained spaces and adaptability across tasks. Increasing the dexterity of robotic arms has been indeed traditionally accomplished by increasing the number of degrees of freedom of the system; however, once a robotic task has been established (e.g., a pick-and-place operation), the motion of the end-effector can be normally achieved using less than 6-DOF (i.e., lower mobility). The aim of malleable robots is to close the technological gap that separates current cobots from achieving flexible, accessible manufacturing automation with a reduced number of actuators.