Contact-aware robot design

#Discussion(IoTStack) [ via IoTGroup ]

Such task-driven manipulator optimization has potential for a wide range of applications in manufacturing and warehouse robot systems where each task needs to be performed repeatedly but different manipulators would be suitable for individual tasks.This led researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to create a new method to computationally optimize the shape and control of a robotic manipulator for a specific task.

Their system uses software to manipulate the design simulate the robot doing a task and then provide an optimization score to assess the design and control.Most robotic hands are designed for general purposes as it’s very tedious to make task-specific hands.Existing methods battle trade-offs between the complexity of designs critical for contact-rich tasks and the practical constraints of manufacturing and contact handling.

Adequate biomimicry in robotics necessitates a delicate balance between design and control an integral part of making our machines more like us.With machines designing a new robotic manipulator could mean long manual iteration cycles of designing fabricating and evaluating guided by human intuition.Seeking to test the functionality of the system the team first created a single robotic finger design to flip over a box on the ground.They also developed a model for an assembly task where a two-finger design put a small cube into a larger movable mount.Traditionally this joint optimization process consists of using simple more primitive shapes to approximate each component of a robot design.

When creating a three-segment robotic finger for example it would likely be approximated by three connected cylinders where the algorithm optimizes the length and radius to achieve the desired design and shape.While this would simplify the optimization problem oversimplifying the shape would be limiting for more complex designs and ultimately complex tasks.A simulator was developed by the team to

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