Nicholas Rodenberg

TL;DR: It is shown that volume changes of less than 0.5% suffice to grip objects reliably and hold them with forces exceeding many times their weight, and opens up new possibilities for the design of simple, yet highly adaptive systems that excel at fast gripping of complex objects.

TL;DR: A simple passive universal gripper, consisting of a mass of granular material encased in an elastic membrane, that can rapidly grip and release a wide range of objects that are typically challenging for universal grippers, such as flat objects, soft objects, or objects with complex geometries is described.

TL;DR: A new paradigm in soft robots is presented that utilizes jamming of a granular medium and the concept of activators (as opposed to actuators) is presented to jam and unjam cells that modulate the direction and amount of work done by a single central actuator.

TL;DR: It is found that particle shape controls the details of the stress-strain curves and can be used to tune packing stiffness and yielding and identify trends among the various shapes that allow for designing a packing's aggregate behavior.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present measurements of the stress response of packings formed from a wide range of particle shapes, including convex shapes such as the Platonic solids, truncated tetrahedra, and triangular bipyramids, as well as more complex, nonconvex geometries such as hexapods with various arm lengths, dolos, and tetrahedral frames.