1/6/2016 Emily Scott
ISE PhD student Naveen Kumar Uppalapati and MechSE Master’s student Xiaotian Zhang recently won third place at the ASME Student Mechanism and Robot Design Competition.
Written by Emily Scott
ISE PhD student Naveen Kumar Uppalapati and MechSE Master’s student Xiaotian Zhang recently won third place at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) Student Mechanism and Robot Design Competition: Graduate Division for their project, ‘BR2 manipulator with a Soft gripper.’ Naveen and Zhang are members of Monolithic Systems Lab directed by Dr. Girish Krishnan in ISE department.
The BR2 manipulator is a soft robot intended to be used in assistive devices where safe interaction with humans is essential, in cases like assistive feeding or human safe automation. It uses a range of deformation patterns that are obtainable from novel pneumatic actuators known as Fiber Reinforced Elastomeric Enclosures (FREEs).
FREEs can perform several motion patterns apart from translation such as rotation and screw motions. The BR2 manipulator has one FREE that exclusively bends and two FREEs that exclusively rotate(thus the name BR2)in parallel combination to make it capable of spatial motion.
Using inexpensive materials and fabrication techniques, the BR2 manipulator is very cost effective and could become a low-cost alternative to existing safe robots in automation. When coupled with a simple control architecture, the BR2 manipulator together with a soft gripper can act as a pick and place robot in space, meaning that it could be used to move objects and increase production rates.
Naveen, a second-year PhD student in systems and entrepreneurial engineering, contributed to the project primarily with the BR2 manipulator’s design and analysis. He said that their win at ASME’s competition was encouraging.
“Soft robots are gaining a lot of popularity, as this is an open research area which needs to be explored. A lot of people were interested in our work when we presented it in the competition,” he said. “This prize will keep me as well as our group motivated in our research pursuits to invent and fabricate the next generation of soft robots.”
Zhang, a second-year Master’s student in MechSE, contributed the soft gripper’s design and fabrication to the project.
“I feel really happy on joining this competition regardless of what prize we have,” Zhang said. “I think that will encourage me a lot to continue working on soft robotics.”