• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.274-280
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• 2024

With the recent emergence of collaborative robots, demand for grippers to be used in service sites is increasing. Soft grippers have advantages in terms of compliance, cost, weight, and stability, but it is difficult to handle objects of various shapes, sizes, and weights with a single gripper. In this study, based on a fluidic elastomer actuator (FEA), we propose a pneumatic soft gripper that can grip a variety of objects, consisting of fingers capable of both grasping and vacuum suction and a base with variable stroke between the fingers using a pneumatic cylinder. A check valve is installed inside the finger, so that when positive pressure is supplied, the finger expands to perform adaptive grasping, and when negative pressure is supplied, vacuum suction can be performed. Grasping experiments were conducted on various objects to evaluate the performance of the proposed gripper, and 94% of 54 gripping objects were successfully grasped.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.35-40
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• 2021

As the robot industry develops, industrial automation uses industrial robots in many parts of the manufacturing industry. However, rigidity-based conventional robots have a disadvantage in that they are challenging to use in environments where they grab fragile objects or interact with people because of their high rigidity. Therefore, researches on soft robot have been actively conducted. The soft robot can hold or manipulate fragile objects by using its compliance and has high safety even in an atypical environment with human interaction. However, these advantages are difficult to use in dynamic situations and control by the material's nonlinear behavior. However, for the soft robot to be used in the industry, control is essential. Therefore, in this paper, real-time PD control is applied, and the behavior of the soft actuator is analyzed by providing various waveforms as inputs. Also, Iterative learning control (ILC) is applied to reduce errors and select an ILC type suitable for soft actuators.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.1011-1020
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• 2016

This paper introduces a tactilely transparent soft glove composed of soft materials and flexible structures. Although it is hard to achieve a high grasping force with conventional grip-assist gloves made from soft material, the proposed glove can exert a high force by using a novel structure. This structure has a triangular shape composed of flexible structural frames, soft fabric, and belts. It can produce grip-assist moment compliantly without harmful force or misalignment with the human fingers. The whole finger part that comes into contact with objects is made of thin and soft fabric in order to facilitate sensation transference. The proposed tactilely transparent soft glove enables the user to manipulate various objects owing to both the softness and high grasping force; it helps lifting heavy weight objects as well as permitting delicate tactile feeling on the palm and fingers. The proposed concept was applied to a two-finger grip-assist device for validation. In addition, the experimental results regarding grasping objects, fingertip force, and grasping force are presented.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2001

We present a scheme and a data structure that decompose the space into adaptive-sized cells to improve the visualization of soft objects. Soft objects are visualized through the evaluation of the field functions at every point of the space. According to the propsed scheme, the affecting soft objects for a point in the space is searched through the data structure called interval tree based on the bounding volume of the components, which represent a soft object whose defining primitive(skeleton) is a simple geometric object such as point or line segment. The bounding volume of each component is generated with respect to the radius of a local field function of the component, threshold value, and the relations between the components and other neighboring components. The proposed scheme can be used in many applications for soft objects such as modeling and rendering, especially in interactive modeling process.

• Journal of Internet of Things and Convergence
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.97-104
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• 2023

This paper is related to object segmentation using ESRGAN(Enhanced Super Resolution GAN) and SSS(Semantic Soft Segmentation). The segmentation performance of the object segmentation method using Mask R-CNN and SSS proposed by the research team in this paper is generally good, but the segmentation performance is poor when the size of the objects is relatively small. This paper is to solve these problems. The proposed method aims to improve segmentation performance of small objects by performing super-resolution through ESRGAN and then performing SSS when the size of an object detected through Mask R-CNN is below a certain threshold. According to the proposed method, it was confirmed that the segmentation characteristics of small-sized objects can be improved more effectively than the previous method.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.123-132
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• 2018

Various methods have been proposed to efficiently animate the motion of soft objects in realtime. In order to maintain the topology between the elements of the objects, it is required to employ constraint forces, which limit the size of the time steps for the numerical integration and reduce the efficiency. To tackle this, an implicit method with larger steps was proposed. However, the method is, in essence, a linear system with a large matrix, of which solution requires heavy computations. Several approximate methods have been proposed, but the approximation is obtained with an increased damping and the loss of accuracy. In this paper, new integration method based on harmonic oscillation with better stability was proposed, and it was further stabilized with the hybridization with approximate implicit method. GPU parallelism can be easily implemented for the method, and large-scale soft objects can be simulated in realtime.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.17-22
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• 2021

Soft robot research has been actively conducted due to the advantages of soft materials that have less motion restrictions and higher energy efficiency compared to rigid robots. In particular, soft robots are being applied in more and more diverse fields, and the need for soft robots is increasing, especially when dealing with soft or deformable objects that rigid robots cannot perform. Various soft robots are being developed, and studies on artificial muscles with versatility, seamless integration with sensing, and self-healing capabilities are being proposed. In this study, we propose one of the most simple rectangular shaped HASEL (Hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic) actuators and compare the performance according to shape deformation such as the size or ratio of actuators and electrodes. Developing these actuators can be used in many ways for artificial muscles in soft robotics.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.23-28
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• 2021

The gripper with a soft pneumatic actuator uses a soft material, unlike the gripper that uses a rigid body, so it is safer and lighter to interact with objects without advanced control technology. Among the soft pneumatic actuators that have been studied, PneuNets actuators have bellows shape, which enable quick operation and complete bending with only small material deformation at low pressure. In this study, we suggested improved form of PneuNets actuators to obtain the performance of the soft actuator that a larger bending angle and larger bending force at a small pressure. An experiment was designed and conducted to measure the bending angle and bending force according to the pressure. As a result, it was confirmed through experiments that the improved model has a maximum bending angle at a pressure of 5 kPa lower than that of the previous model, and a maximum bending force of 1.97 times at the same pressure.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.77 no.2
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• pp.167-177
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• 2021

Due to various benefits such as unlimited degrees of freedom, environment adaptability, and safety for humans, engineers have used soft materials with hyperelastic behavior in various industrial, medical, rescue, and other sectors. One of the applications of these materials in the fabrication of bending soft actuators (SA) is that they have eliminated many problems in the actuators such as production cost, mechanical complexity, and design algorithm. However, SA has complexities, such as predicting and monitoring behavior despite the many benefits. The first part of this paper deals with the prediction of SA behavior through mathematical models such as Ogden and Darijani, and its comparison with the results of experiments. At first, by examining different geometric models, the cubic structure was selected as the optimal structure in the investigated models. This geometrical structure at the same pressure showed the most significant bending in the simulation. The simulation results were then compared with experimental, and the final gripper model was designed and manufactured using a 3D printer with silicone rubber as for the polymer part. This geometrical structure is capable of bending up to a 90-degree angle at 70 kPa in less than 2 seconds. The second section is dedicated to monitoring the bending behavior created by the strain sensors with different sensitivity and stretchability. In the fabrication of the sensors, silicon is used as a soft material with hyperelastic behavior and carbon fiber as a conductive material in the soft material substrate. The SA designed in this paper is capable of deforming up to 1000 cycles without changing its characteristics and capable of moving objects weigh up to 1200 g. This SA has the capability of being used in soft robots and artificial hand making for high-speed objects harvesting.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.713-720
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• 2012

Unlike FEM (Finite Element Method), which provides an accurate deformation of soft objects, FFD (Free Form Deformation) based methods have been widely used for a quick and responsive representation of deformable objects in real-time applications such as computer games, animations, or simulations. The FFD-AABB (Free Form Deformation Axis Aligned Bounding Box) algorithm was also suggested to address the collision handling problems between deformable objects at an interactive rate. This paper proposes an enhanced FFD-AABB algorithm to improve the frame rate of simulation by adding the bounding sphere based collision test between 3D deformable objects. We provide a comparative analysis with previous methods and the result of proposed method shows about an 85% performance improvement.