Robotic Granular Jamming: A New Variable Stiffness Mechanism

Bio-Inspired Connective Granular Jamming for a Robotic Limb

2 Granular jamming consists of constraining a large quantity of small particles within a membrane, similar to the use of hydrostatic and muscle forces in invertebrates to stiffen their bodies. However, current works on jamming have not examined the effect of coupling particles together, akin to connective tissue in animals. We present a study which provides a comparison between coupled and deco...

Multi-Fingered Haptic Palpation utilizing Granular Jamming Stiffness Feedback Actuators

This paper describes a multi-fingered haptic palpation method using stiffness feedback actuators for simulating tissue palpation procedures in traditional and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. Soft tissue stiffness is simulated by changing the stiffness property of the actuator during palpation. For the first time, granular jamming and pneumatic air actuation are combined together to r...

Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material

Gripping and holding of objects are key tasks for robotic manipulators. The development of universal grippers able to pick up unfamiliar objects of widely varying shape and surface properties remains, however, challenging. Most current designs are based on the multifingered hand, but this approach introduces hardware and software complexities. These include large numbers of controllable joints,...

Jamming of Granular Matter

Fragile granular jamming

We demonstrate experimentally that the route to a jammed state for a set of bi-dispersed frictional disks, subjected to uni-axial compression from a random initial unjammed state, consists of a consolidation state, a fragile jammed state, and finally a rigid jammed state. In the consolidation regime, the pressure on the sides increases very slowly with the packing fraction φ and there are no de...