IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2017 - 18
tc spotlight
Bringing Together Researchers
in Robot Mechanisms and Design
By Aaron Dollar, Claudio Semini, Kyujin Cho, and Matei Ciocarlie
G
one are the days of robot
hardware infancy, where
robot arms were largely bolt-
ed to the ground and mobile
robots consisted of boxes on wheels, a
time when even the simplest of hard-
ware designs were often good enough.
With the advent of robotics into truly
unstructured environments, the me-
chanical hardware of the robot is an
increasingly crucial and challenging
aspect of the system and can often
determine the success or failure of the
task. Application areas such as grasp-
ing and manipulation in a diverse
range of human
environ ments,
locomotion over
A kick-off social
rough terrain,
event was held
search and rescue
in a disaster area,
during the 2014
and collabora-
Intelligent Robots
tive physi cal
human/r o b o t
and Systems
interaction con-
Conference in
vey chal lenging
performance re-
Chicago, where we
quirements on
introduced this new the robot hard-
ware. As a result,
TC, its goals, and
re search into
planned activities.
novel hardware
design paradigms
continues to be a
crucial and active subfield within
robotics but one that, until recently,
had not coalesced into a formal techni-
cal committee.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2016.2646069
Date of publication: 29 March 2017
18
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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE
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When the IEEE Robotics and Auto-
mation Society (RAS) Technical Activi-
ties Board approved the creation of the
Technical Committee (TC) on Robot
Mechanisms and Design at the 2014
International Conference on Robotics
and Automation (ICRA) in Hong Kong,
they created not only a new TC, but a
new kind of TC. According to past
RAS Technical Activities Board Chair
Satoshi Tadokoro, earlier TCs were
formed under the purpose of "explora-
tion of newest (research) areas as tenta-
tive organization" and, therefore,
tended to focus on particular applica-
tion domains of robotics, such as space
or marine robotics.
As a result, work done within the
scope of those TCs typically spans a
wide range of technical approaches,
from sensing and perception, learning,
planning, control, and mechanisms and
design. However, in 2013, the scope of
TCs was broadened to be "science and
technology promotion covering wide
areas as representative of RAS." Under
this expanded scope, the TC on Robot
Mechanisms and Design seeks to unite
the group of RAS researchers who pri-
marily utilize technical approaches in
mechanisms, mechanics, and mechani-
cal design under a single TC to share
approaches and results, solidify stan-
dards of practice, and support the career
development of young researchers in
the area. Additionally, we seek to estab-
lish strong ties to the robotics and
robotic components industries to facili-
tate technology transfer, educate
researchers on new available technolo-
gies, approaches, and standards, and
march 2017
help anchor research approaches to
commercial needs and market viability.
In the two and one-half years since
its formation, the Robot Mechanisms
and Design TC has coordinated or
sponsored a number of events. A kick-
off social event was held during the
2014 Intelligent Robots and Systems
(IROS) Conference in Chicago, where
we introduced this new TC, its goals,
and planned activities. Approximately
25 people attended this event, most of
whom participated in the deep-dish
design competition-building an ad hoc
mechanism using pizza, popsicle sticks,
and rubber bands. (The designs were
much improved after a few beers were
consumed.) The second social event
was an Industry Mixer at ICRA 2015 in
Seattle, focused on industry-academia
collaborations. The goal of the event
was to better understand the interests
and needs of companies that wish to
establish closer ties to academia. This
event was attended by approximately 30
people from academia and companies
including iRobot, Barrett Technology,
MOOG, Amazon Robotics (formerly
Kiva Systems), and OptoForce. Figure 1
shows photos taken at these two events.
Besides the organization of these
events, the Robot Mechanisms and
Design TC has supported approxi-
mately ten workshops at the ICRA and
IROS conferences in the last few years.
Additionally, it has coorganized three
special issues in top publications,
such as this issue of IEEE Robotics and
Automation Magazine, Novel Ap -
proaches to Design and Manufacture of
Fully Integrated Robotic Mechanisms [in
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