Joshua Pinskier

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | CSIRO · Data61

Recent years have seen soft robotic grippers gain increasing attention due to their ability to robustly grasp soft and fragile objects. However, a commonly available standardised evaluation protocol has not yet been developed to assess the performance of varying soft robotic gripper designs. This work introduces a novel protocol, the Soft Grasping...

The ability of robotic grippers to not only grasp but also re-position and re-orient objects in-hand is crucial for achieving versatile, general-purpose manipulation. While recent advances in soft robotic grasping has greatly improved grasp quality and stability, their manipulation capabilities remain under-explored. This paper presents the DexGrip...

Modelling complex deformation for soft robotics provides a guideline to understand their behaviour, leading to safe interaction with the environment. However, building a surrogate model with high accuracy and fast inference speed can be challenging for soft robotics due to the nonlinearity from complex geometry, large deformation, material nonlinea...

Soft robotics has emerged as the standard solution for grasping deformable objects, and has proven invaluable for mobile robotic exploration in extreme environments. However, despite this growth, there are no widely adopted computational design tools that produce quality, manufacturable designs. To advance beyond the diminishing returns of heuristi...

Topology optimization is a powerful design tool in structural engineering and other engineering problems. The design domain is discretized into elements, and a finite element method model is iteratively solved to find the element that maximizes the structure's performance. Although gradient-based solvers have been used to solve topology optimizatio...

Computational design is a critical tool to realize the full potential of Soft Robotics, maximizing their inherent benefits of high performance, flexibility, robustness, and safe interaction. Practically, computational design entails a rapid iterative search process over a parameterized design space, with assessment using (frequently) computational...

Soft grippers are ideal for grasping delicate, deformable objects with complex geometries. Universal soft grippers have proven effective for grasping common objects, however complex objects or environments require bespoke gripper designs. Multi‐material printing presents a vast design‐space which, when coupled with an expressive computational desig...

Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel design of a robotic leg utilising fibre jammed structures as passive compliant mechanisms to achieve variable jo...

Compliant mechanisms actuated by pneumatic loads are receiving increasing attention due to their direct applicability as soft robots that perform tasks using their flexible bodies. Using multiple materials to build them can further improve their performance and efficiency. Due to developments in additive manufacturing, the fabrication of multi-mate...

Soft robotics has created a paradigm shift within robotic grasping and manipulation. Rather than using complex control policies and path planning methods to undertake grasp objects, soft robots use their embodied intelligence to deform around an object and securely hold it. Yet despite major advances in the field in recent years, there remains an a...

Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to sudden and unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to perform auto-corrective movements to maintain balance. In this paper, we propose a novel design of a robotic leg inspired by this mechanism. We develop multi-material...

Generating accurate digital tree models from scanned environments is invaluable for forestry, agriculture, and other outdoor industries in tasks such as identifying fall hazards, estimating trees’ biomass and calculating traversability. Existing methods for tree reconstruction rely on sparse feature identification to segment a forest into individua...

In recent years, soft robotic grasping has rapidly spread through the academic robotics community and pushed into industrial applications. At the same time, multimaterial 3D printing has become widely available, enabling monolithic manufacture of devices containing rigid and elastic section. We propose a novel design technique which leverages both...

With robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RAMIS), patients and surgeons benefit from a reduced incision size and dexterous instruments. However, current robotic surgery platforms lack haptic feedback, which is an essential element of safe operation. Moreover, teleportation control challenges make complex surgical tasks like suturing more ti...

Soft robotics is a rapidly evolving field where robots are fabricated using highly deformable materials and usually follow a bioinspired design. Their high dexterity and safety make them ideal for applications such as gripping, locomotion, and biomedical devices, where the environment is highly dynamic and sensitive to physical interaction. Pneumat...

Generating accurate digital tree models from scanned environments is invaluable for forestry, agriculture, and other outdoor industries in tasks such as identifying biomass, fall hazards and traversability, as well as digital applications such as animation and gaming. Existing methods for tree reconstruction rely on feature identification (trunk, c...

The emerging field of soft robotics presents a new paradigm for robot design in which “precision through rigidity” is replaced by “cognition through compliance.” Lightweight and flexible, soft robots have vast potential to interact with fragile objects and navigate unstructured environments. Like octopuses and worms in nature, soft robots’ flexible...

Fibre jamming is a relatively new and understudied soft robotic mechanism that has previously found success when used in stiffness-tuneable arms and fingers. However, to date researchers have not fully taken advantage of the freedom offered by contemporary fabrication techniques including multi-material 3D printing in the creation of fibre jamming...

The rapid developments in precision applications have increased the demand for high accuracy large range planar 3-DOF micropositioning mechanisms. However, the parasitic motions and cross-axis coupling in these mechanisms pose real challenges for their resolution and accuracy. In this paper, the parasitic motions in a large range 3-DOF XYΘ was inve...

Nanomanufacturing and nanoassembly require positioners capable of producing nanometer order precision with millimeter order workspaces. Current nanopositioners are based on compliant mechanisms or stick-slip/inertial drives. Compliant mechanisms give ultra-high precision but small workspaces, while inertial drives are bulky, expensive, and induce l...

The demand for large range three-degrees-of-freedom (3-DOF) micro/nanopositioning mechanisms has been increased recently for potential utilization in many applications. However, these mechanisms suffer from a large footprint and low motion accuracy, which severely affect their exploitation. In this paper, a compact mechanism is proposed to achieve...

With the advancement of technology, the demand for high precision micrograsping/releasing task is increasing. This paper presents a compliant piezoelectric actuated microgripper for precise positioning tasks. A parasitic motion minimization approach is adopted by the structural design of the microgripper. The over-constrained leaf flexure-based par...

Compliant hinges are one of the most widely used design elements in precision mechanism design. They enable higher precision rotation than multi-part hinges and facilitate the adaptation of macro-scale parallel mechanisms into micro-scale. Existing hinge designs offer either a large range at the expense of rotational accuracy or attempt to produce...

This paper presents a flexure-based piezoelectric actuated microgripper for high precision grasping/releasing tasks. The design of the microgripper consists of a three-stage amplification and transmission mechanism, and the parallel grasping technique. A bridge-type mechanism and two sequential lever-type mechanisms are symmetrically connected to a...

This paper presents a compact flexure-based microgripper for grasping/releasing tasks. The microgripper is based on a double-stair bridge-type mechanism and consists of a bridge-type mechanism for amplifying the input displacement and the integrated parallelogram mechanisms for linearizing the motion at the microgripper jaws. The displacement trans...

In micro/nano manipulation mechanisms, the compliant z/tip/tilt stages have proved to have enormous advantages for out-of-plane positioning. Small workspace is a challenge in designing these out-of-plane positioning systems. This deficiency can be overcome significantly by a new insight into the optimization approach of a compliant mechanism that c...

The mechanical behaviour of adherent cells when subjected to the local indentation can be modelled via various approaches. Specifically, the tensegrity structure has been widely used in describing the organization of discrete intracellular cytoskeletal components, including microtubules (MTs) and microfilaments. The establishment of a tensegrity mo...

Planar 3-Degree of Freedom (3-DOF) micropositioning stages are widely adopted in many precision applications for their ability to provide in-plane rotation. However, their motion accuracy is adversely affected by cross-couplings, model uncertainty, and external disturbances. This work proposes an optimized robust control methodology based on distur...

In fields requiring precision manipulation, monolithic flexures are frequently used to guide motion. They utilize the structure's predictable elastic deformation, when a force is applied, to facilitate linear and rotational motions. Amongst the several common flexure designs, leaf flexures are the best suited to ‘large’ displacement tasks. Their ra...

Bridge structures are one of the two most common design elements for providing input from stroke-limited piezoelectric actuators to flexure based mechanisms for micro/nano positioning and manipulation. However, the amplification achieved by such structures is dependent on both the element geometry and the load provided by the driven mechanism. In t...

In the field of micromanipulation, there exists a pressing need for flexible manipulation systems that facilitate the intuitive performance of a range of micro-scale tasks. Parallel or serial chains of compliant flexure mechanisms, driven by piezoelectric actuators (PEAs) are ideal micropositioners for these tasks. They offer smooth, continuous mot...

Compliant bridge mechanisms are frequently utilized to scale micrometer order motions of piezoelectric actuators to levels suitable for desired applications. Analytical equations have previously been specifically developed for two configurations of bridge mechanisms: parallel and rhombic type. Based on elastic beam theory, a kinematic analysis of c...

The development of many applications of microtechnology requires flexible new manipulation tools to perform micromanipulation tasks. A modular piezo-actuated translational flexure-based mechanism is investigated as a basis for the construction of bespoke micromanipulators. The design allows individual single degree of freedom (DOF) translational mo...

The design, computational analysis, and experimental study of a modular flexure-based micro/nano manipulator is presented. The system combines a novel, compact, modular flexure-based mechanism with a haptic device, and a bilateral control architecture to enable rapid haptically-guided micromanipulation tasks. In principle the modular design allows...