[2505.24860] PB&J: Peanut Butter and Joints for Damped Articulation

Abstract:Many bioinspired robots mimic the rigid articulated joint structure of the human hand for grasping tasks, but experience high-frequency mechanical perturbations that can destabilize the system and negatively affect precision without a high-frequency controller. Despite having bandwidth-limited controllers that experience time delays between sensing and actuation, biological systems can respond successfully to and mitigate these high-frequency perturbations. Human joints include damping and stiffness that many rigid articulated bioinspired hand robots lack. To enable researchers to explore the effects of joint viscoelasticity in joint control, we developed a human-hand-inspired grasping robot with viscoelastic structures that utilizes accessible and bioderived materials to reduce the economic and environmental impact of prototyping novel robotic systems. We demonstrate that an elastic element at the finger joints is necessary to achieve concurrent flexion, which enables secure grasping of spherical objects. To significantly damp the manufactured finger joints, we modeled, manufactured, and characterized rotary dampers using peanut butter as an organic analog joint working fluid. Finally, we demonstrated that a real-time position-based controller could be used to successfully catch a lightweight falling ball. We developed this open-source, low-cost grasping platform that abstracts the morphological and mechanical properties of the human hand to enable researchers to explore questions about biomechanics in roboto that would otherwise be difficult to test in simulation or modeling.

PB&J: Peanut Butter and Joints for Damped Articulation Avery S. Williamson1+ , Michael J. Bennington1+ , Ravesh Sukhnandan1+ , Mrinali Nakhre1 , Yuemin Mao5 , and Victoria A. Webster-Wood1,2,3,4,5 Depts. of 1 Mechanical Engineering, 2 Biomedical Engineering, and 3 Material Science, McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, 5 Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon…

saved by

• Yoyo Yuan

related reading

• Soft Robotic Link with Controllable Transparency for Vision-based Tactile and Proximity Sensingquan-luu.github.io
• [2108.08449] A cut-and-fold self-sustained compliant oscillator for autonomous actuation of origami-inspired robotsarxiv.org
• Generating Robot Hands from Human Demonstrationsarxiv.org
• Development of a High-speed Multifingered Hand System and Its Application to Catchingishikawa-vision.org
• A Unified Model for Motion-Conditioned Robot Co-designtransformer-transformer.github.io
• PLATO Hand: Shaping Contact Behavior with Fingernails for Precise Manipulationplatohand.github.io
• A novel sEMG-based force interaction strategy of supernumerary robotic limbslink.springer.com
• biomimetics.mit.edubiomimetics.mit.edu
• OSMO: Open-Source Tactile Glove for Human-to-Robot Skill Transferarxiv.org
• [2501.12493] ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-anthropomorphic Robotarxiv.org
• Smooth Operator: A Real-Time Sampling-Based Algorithm for Kinematic Hand Retargetingmimicrobotics.github.io
• TossingBot: Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects with Residual Physicarxiv.org