Runze Zuo
Current Ph.D. Student @ University of Michigan MechEng
B.S. University of Toronto, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Resarch Spotlight
Compact Underwater Robot with Depth Independent Hydraulic Powered Soft Gripper
Runze Zuo, Z Zhou, Z Qin,
P Pan, S Wang, B Ying, and X Liu
Under Preperation 2022
To address the challenges in constraint space soft manipulation, we propose and demonstrated an extremely compact, highly integrated underwater robot system with soft manipulation and propeller-based locomotion. The robot is capable of navigating to the target and retrieving it to the host (ROV, manned submarine, etc.) while the host does not need to move. The experiment result shows that our robot can serve as a novel substitution for the robotic arm + soft gripper configuration, greatly extending the working radius of the underwater sample collection system, and allowing them to operate smoothly in the constraint spaces.
A Soft Robotic Gripper with Anti-Freezing Ionic Hydrogel-Based Sensors for Learning-Based Object Recognition
Ruunze Zuo, Z Zhou, B Ying, X Liu
ICRA 2021
Soft robotic grippers possess high structural compliance and adaptability for grasping objects with unknown and irregular shapes and sizes. To enable more dexterous manipulation, soft sensors with similar mechanical properties to common elastomer materials are desired to be integrated into soft grippers. In this paper, we develop ionic hydrogel-based strain and tactile sensors and integrate these sensors into a three-finger soft gripper for learning-based object recognition. Such hydrogel-based sensors have excellent conductivity, high stretchability and toughness, good ambient stability, and unique anti-freezing property, and can be readily attached to a soft gripper at desired locations for strain and tactile sensing. Based on a deep-learning model, we demonstrate the capability of the sensory soft gripper for object grasping and recognition at both room and freezing temperatures and achieve high recognition accuracy close to 100\% for 10 typical objects. The ionic hydrogel-based sensors could also find other important applications in sensing and control of soft robotic systems.
Handheld Electrochemical Workstation
Runze Zuo
Technical Project, Unpublished
2021
This handheld electrochemical workstation can perform a wide variety of tests such as frequency sweep, [more functions in progress]. The system utilizes a touchscreen display as the input method, powered by a lithium polymer battery rechargeable via USB-C port, loaded with an onboard file system, data processing software, and data presentation tools. Also, a powerful, easy-to-use C library for adding an interactive component to the system is developed. The user can create their own test procedure pages within few lines of code.
ICRA 2021 Project Demonstration Video
Swimming Gripper Demonstration Video
Contact Me
Email: zuorunze[at][guesswhat?]
