Robotic Hardware: The beamlines currently available to the Center each have a robotic crystal mounting system, developed under NIH R01 funding to Thomas Earnest. The robot has a large liquid nitrogen dewar and cryo-pin gripper assembly (Fig. 1). The dewar is rotated and translated in order to position the required crystal under the gripper assembly. The gripper is then translated vertically out...

Generic interfaces to robot hardware can improve the programming process by making it easier for developers to port applications between different robotic systems. The Player project provides abstract interfaces to aide porting, but until recently did not have any direct support for robotic limbs. This paper describes the design and implementation of three new generic interfaces for robotic lim...

Soft robotics is an emerging field with strong potential to serve as an educational tool due to its advantages such as low costs and shallow learning curves. In this paper, we introduce a modular and reconfigurable mold for flexible design of pneumatic soft robotic grippers. By using simple assembly kits, students at all levels are able to design and construct soft robotic grippers that vary in...

This study addresses the design and testing of a novel soft robotic gripper actuated by an electromagnet with which to handle of unpackaged delicate fruits in the food industry. Traditional rigid mechanical grippers are not applicable to manipulate delicate food products because their gripping action can easily bruise or damage fragile food products during handling due to hard contacts. In addi...

A four degree-of-freedom (DOF) robotic mechanism can be used to manipulate objects in six DOF by using a gripper altered for two-point pivot grasping where the force of gravity is used for six DOF reorientation. We show that one pivot grasp is sufficient to rotate an ashlar-shaped object from known initial stable configuration into arbitrary final stable configuration. If the initial configurat...

A robotic cell is a manufacturing system that is widely used in industry. Our research concerns scheduling of multiple products in a robotic cell served by a dual-gripper robot. The cell contains two robot-served machines repetitively producing a set of multiple parts in a steady state. The processing constraints specify the cell to be a flow shop. The purpose is to find simultaneously a robot ...