Boundary Constrained Swarms, a New Concept in Soft Robotics

Abstract: Soft robots can offer many advantages over traditional rigid robots including conformability to different object geometries, shape changing, safer physical interaction with humans, the ability to handle delicate objects, and grasping without the need for high-precision control algorithms. Despite these advantages, soft robots often lack high force capacity, scalability, responsive locomotion and object handling, and a self-contained untethered design, all of which have hindered their adoption. To address these issues, we have been developing a series of robots comprised of several rigid robotic subunits flexibly connected to their neighbors by a closed-loop, granule-filled, soft. As an analogy, consider a bike chain where the links are no longer rigid, but rather elastic. The jamming feature allows the robots to exert relatively large forces on objects in the environment, the modular design resolves the scalability issue, and using decentralized robotic subunits allows the robot to configure itself in a variety of shapes and conform to objects, all while locomoting. The result is a compliant, high-degree-of-freedom boundary constrained swarm with excellent morphability. This talk presents several examples of our work on these systems including design, localization, and control algorithms.

Bio: Matthew Spenko is a professor in the Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Prof. Spenko earned the B.S. degree cum laude in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in 1999 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001 and 2005 respectively. He was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Scholar in the Mechanical Engineering Department’s Center for Design Research at Stanford University from 2005 to 2007. He has been a faculty member at the Illinois Institute of Technology since 2007, received tenure in 2013, and was promoted to full professor in 2019. His research is in the general area of robotics with specific attention to mobility in challenging environments and localization safety. Prof. Spenko is a senior member of IEEE and an associate editor of Field Robotics. His work has been featured in popular media such as the New York Times, CNET, Engadget, and DiscoveryNews. Examples of his robots are on permanent display in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.