IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2017 - 30

from the guest editors

Open-Source and Widely
Disseminated Robot Hardware
By Aaron Dollar, Francesco Mondada,
Alberto Rodriguez, and Giorgio Metta

he open-source movement
has already revolutionized a
number of industries by em powering end users to contribute to the products that they need
and want and by fueling grass-roots
development and continual im provement of projects in completely
new areas. While there have been
innumerable successes in software and
electronics hardware, open mechanical
hardware is taking longer to
catch on. There
While there have
are a number of
likely reasons for
been innumerable
this, including
successes in
the complexity,
exp ens e, and
software and
time associated
electronics
with fabricating
mechanical comhardware, open
ponents as well
mechanical
as the challenge
and reliability
hardware is taking
of assembling
longer to catch on.
the wide range
of mechanical
and electronic
components required to produce a fully
functional system. In comparison with
open-source software efforts, open
hardware has numerous additional
practical challenges associated with
dissemination and evolution of the
product driven by end users.
However, rapid fabrication technologies have improved to the point of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2016.2646068
Date of publication: 29 March 2017

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

being able to produce parts that are
strong, robust, and precise enough for
practical robotic systems, and the pricing of the systems and supplies have
lowered to the point that many of
these machines are available in fabrication facilities at most universities.
Along those lines, and also partly
driven by the maker movement, opensource computer-aided design software has improved to the point of
being sufficient for many applications.
With these and other technologies,
users can more easily fabricate and
improve on open-source mechanical
hardware without requiring large
commitments in terms of cost, time,
and domain expertise.
In the field of robotics, there has
existed a relatively large void in terms
of the availability of adequate hardware, particularly for research applications. The few systems that have
been appropriate for advanced applications have been extremely costly
and not very durable. For those and
other reasons, innovation in commercially available hardware is extremely slow, with a historically small
market and expensive and slow
development cycles. Effective opensource hardware that can be easily
and inexpensively fabricated would
not only substantially lower costs and
increase accessibility to these systems, but would drastically improve
innovation and customization of
available hardware.
This special issue presents a collection of seven articles that describe
high-quality efforts in open-source

March 2017

robotic hardware that can be considered exemplars for the topic. They
span a wide range in scope, from
subsystem design, such as fabricating functional joints and actuators,
to complete standalone robotic systems as well as application domains
ranging from educational robots to
haptic interfaces.
In several projects, the open-source
model is used to create flexible research
tools that can be duplicated and modified by the robotics community to
explore key research areas. One of these
projects is the Yale OpenHand Project,
presented in the article by R. Ma and
A. Dollar, which targets research in
robotic grasping and manipulation.
Their design library allows for quick
customization of the robot end effector,
ensuring low-cost production using
three-dimensional printing combined
with a set of techniques that ensure the
robustness of the system. The article
by I. Fitzner et al. presents an inexpensive and rapid fabrication technique for
the implementation of flexures joints in
folded structures. The authors illustrate
the utility of the technique by quickly
iterating on the structure of a 90-cm
long hexapod robot.
Another key research area taking
advantage of the use of open-source
hardware is soft robotics, with two
special issue articles showing rather
different approaches in this domain.
The article by C. Della Santina et al.
presents a kit of modular components
that can be assembled to quickly
prototype new forms of soft robots.
This kit is built around a family of

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2017