This work presents a fast anytime algorithm for computing globally optimal independent contact regions (ICRs). ICRs are regions such that one contact within each region enables a valid grasp. Locations of ICRs can provide guidance for grasp and manipulation planning, learning, and policy transfer. However, ICRs for modern applications have been little explored, in part due to the expense of computing them, as they have a search space exponential in the number of contacts. We present a divide and conquer algorithm based on incremental n-dimensional Delaunay triangulation that produces results with bounded suboptimality in times sufficient for real-time planning. This paper presents the base algorithm for grasps where contacts lie within a plane. Our experiments show substantial benefits over competing grasp quality metrics and speedups of 100X and more for competing approaches to computing ICRs. We explore robustness of a policy guided by ICRs and outline a path to general 3D implementation. Code will be released on publication to facilitate further development and applications.

Quantum computing experiments are transitioning from running on physical qubits to using encoded, logical qubits. Fault-tolerant computation can identify and correct errors, and has the potential to enable the dramatically reduced logical error rates required for valuable algorithms. However, it requires flexible control of high-fidelity operations performed on large numbers of qubits. We demonstrate fault-tolerant quantum computation on a quantum processor with 256 qubits, each an individual neutral Ytterbium atom. The operations are designed so that key error sources convert to atom loss, which can be detected by imaging. Full connectivity is enabled by atom movement. We demonstrate the entanglement of 24 logical qubits encoded into 48 atoms, at once catching errors and correcting for, on average 1.8, lost atoms. We also implement the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm with up to 28 logical qubits encoded into 112 atoms, showing better-than-physical error rates. In both cases, "erasure conversion," changing errors into a form that can be detected independently from qubit state, improves circuit performance. These results begin to clear a path for achieving scientific quantum advantage with a programmable neutral atom quantum processor.

Haptic devices have proven valuable in educational settings for enhancing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. By simulating touch-based interactions, these systems facilitate hands-on experiences that effectively convey complex engineering and mathematics concepts, positively influencing students' engagement in STEM subjects. However, to our knowledge, existing educational haptic devices have not specifically targeted teaching concepts related to dexterous robotic manipulation. In this paper, we introduce the HapDeltaZ, a novel, 3D-printed, low-cost, grounded kinesthetic haptic device featuring a compliant Delta mechanism. The device provides feedback in three degrees of freedom to a user's thumb, enabling interaction with virtual objects of varying stiffness. The HapDeltaZ design prioritizes optimizing the thumb's workspace to enhance dexterity and facilitate natural movement. We evaluated the performance of the HapDeltaZ through a user study, assessing participants' ability to differentiate virtual objects based on stiffness. Our results indicate that participants could consistently distinguish between different stiffness values across two virtual environments.

Ultracold neutral atoms have emerged as a leading platform for scalable quantum simulation, but can they be similarly used for gate-based quantum computation? In this talk, I will present an overview of major accomplishments in academia that have spurred multiple different startups to enter the quantum computing race, focusing on the use of neutral atoms as a scalable qubit platform. With these proof of principle demonstrations in mind, I will describe Atom Computing's first prototype system and recently announced use of a unique qubit to achieve bare coherence times in excess of 20 seconds. Utilizing qubit states that are broadly insensitive to the environment they are trapped in, this system is quickly becoming a testbed for how to build programmatic control into neutral atom systems that rivals other leading quantum computing platforms.

This paper explores a novel approach to dexterous manipulation, aimed at levels of speed, precision, robustness, and simplicity suitable for practical deployment. The enabling technology is a Direct-drive Hand (DDHand) comprising two fingers, two DOFs each, that exhibit high speed and a light touch. The test application is the dexterous manipulation of three small and irregular parts, moving them to a grasp suitable for a subsequent assembly operation, regardless of initial presentation. We employed four primitive behaviors that use ground contact as a "third finger", prior to or during the grasp process: pushing, pivoting, toppling, and squeeze-grasping. In our experiments, each part was presented from 30 to 90 times randomly positioned in each stable pose. Success rates varied from 83% to 100%. The time to manipulate and grasp was 6.32 seconds on average, varying from 2.07 to 16 seconds. In some cases, performance was robust, precise, and fast enough for practical applications, but in other cases, pose uncertainty required time-consuming vision and arm motions. The paper concludes with a discussion of further improvements required to make the primitives robust, eliminate uncertainty, and reduce this dependence on vision and arm motion.

Ultracold neutral atoms have emerged as a promising platform for scalable quantum computation. Universal single-qubit control requires high quality state preparation, spatially resolved manipulation, and projective readout of each qubit. For state preparation and readout, neutral atom platforms can apply techniques commonly used in quantum gas microscopes and single atom trapping machines. Furthermore, the ability to isolate the internal spin states of individual neutral atoms from both external fields and neighboring atoms allows for seconds-scale coherence times. Here, we will present progress on the coherent, site-resolved control of an array of atomic qubits comprised of neutral strontium atoms.

There has been an explosion of ideas in soft robotics over the past decade, resulting in unprecedented opportunities for end effector design. Soft robot hands offer benefits of low-cost, compliance, and customized design, with the promise of dexterity and robustness. The space of opportunities is vast and exciting. However, new tools are needed to understand the capabilities of such manipulators and to facilitate manipulation planning with soft manipulators that exhibit free-form deformations. To address this challenge, we introduce a sampling based approach to discover and model continuous families of manipulations for soft robot hands. We give an overview of the soft foam robots in production in our lab and describe novel algorithms developed to characterize manipulation families for such robots. Our approach consists of sampling a space of manipulation actions, constructing Gaussian Mixture Model representations covering successful regions, and refining the results to create continuous successful regions representing the manipulation family. The space of manipulation actions is very high dimensional; we consider models with and without dimensionality reduction and provide a rigorous approach to compare models across different dimensions by comparing coverage of an unbiased test dataset in the full dimensional parameter space. Results show that some dimensionality reduction is typically useful in populating the models, but without our technique, the amount of dimensionality reduction to use is difficult to predict ahead of time and can depend on the hand and task. The models we produce can be used to plan and carry out successful, robust manipulation actions and to compare competing robot hand designs.

There has been great progress in soft robot design, manufacture, and control in recent years, and soft robots are a tool of choice for safe and robust handling of objects in conditions of uncertainty. Still, dexterous in-hand manipulation using soft robots remains a challenge. This paper introduces foam robot hands actuated by tendons sewn through a fabric glove. The flexibility of tendon actuation allows for high competence in utilizing deformation for robust in-hand manipulation. We discuss manufacturing, control, and design optimization for foam robots and demonstrate robust grasping and in-hand manipulation on a variety of different physical hand prototypes.

We present a novel class of tendon-actuated soft robots, which promise to be low-cost and accessible to non-experts. The primary structure of the robot consists of flexible foam, and so we term the robots created using our approach “foam robots.” A foam robot moves by driving servo mounted winches that contract (or slacken)tendons routed through the robots textile skin. We provide a methodology for fabricating these types of robots and go on to fabricate several ‘foam robots’ in the form of multi-fingered hands and perform various experiments and demonstrations to illustrate the robust applications of these robots to tasks such as dexterous manipulation.

One of the most remarkable properties of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond is that optical illumination initializes its electronic spin almost completely, a feature that can be exploited to polarize other spin species in their proximity. Here we use field-cycled nuclear magnetic resonance to investigate the mechanisms of spin-polarization transfer from NVs to C-13 spins in diamond at room temperature. We focus on the dynamics near 51 mT, where a fortuitous combination of energy-matching conditions between electron and nuclear spin levels gives rise to alternative polarization transfer channels. By monitoring the C-13 spin polarization as a function of the applied magnetic field, we show C-13 spin pumping takes place via a multispin cross-relaxation process involving the NV- spin and the electronic and nuclear spins of neighboring P1 centers. Further, we find that this mechanism is insensitive to the crystal orientation relative to the magnetic field, although the absolute level of C-13 polarization-reaching up to similar to 3% under optimal conditions-can vary substantially depending on the interplay between optical pumping efficiency, photogenerated carriers, and laser-induced heating.

This paper presents a series of control strategies for soft compliant manipulators. We provide a novel approach to control multi-fingered tendon-driven foam hands using a CyberGlove and a simple ridge regression model. The results achieved include complex posing, dexterous grasping and inhand manipulations. To enable efficient data sampling and a more intuitive design process of foam robots, we implement and evaluate a finite element based simulation. The accuracy of this model is evaluated using a Vicon motion capture system. We then use this simulation to solve inverse kinematics and compare the performance of supervised learning, reinforcement learning, nearest neighbor and linear ridge regression methods in terms of their accuracy and sample efficiency.

Presented are techniques for designing, modeling, and control of reliable pneumatic artificial muscle actuators with integrated low profile sensors for position feedback. The sensor is fabricated through a three-dimensional manufacturing process based on a modified lathe approach for controlling viscous and viscoelastic materials as well as on direct writing of liquid metal. Next, a new precision pneumatic muscle design and its integration with the sensor is illustrated. A theoretical model and experimental characterization of the muscle-sensor package are presented with high correlation and repeatability. Finally, a position feedback sliding mode controller is implemented with a position error of <0.9% of maximum muscle contraction.

As robots begin to interact with humans and operate in human environments, safety becomes a major concern. Conventional robots, although reliable and consistent, can cause injury to anyone within its range of motion. Soft robotics, wherein systems are made to be soft and mechanically compliant, are thus a promising alternative due to their lightweight nature and ability to cushion impacts, but current designs often sacrifice accuracy and usefulness for safety. We, therefore, have developed a bioinspired robotic arm combining elements of rigid and soft robotics such that it exhibits the positive qualities of both, namely compliance and accuracy, while maintaining a low weight. This article describes the design of a robotic arm-wrist-hand system with seven degrees of freedom (DOFs). The shoulder and elbow each has two DOFs for two perpendicular rotational motions on each joint, and the hand has two DOFs for wrist rotations and one DOF for a grasp motion. The arm is pneumatically powered using custom-built McKibben type pneumatic artificial muscles, which are inflated and deflated using binary and proportional valves. The wrist and hand motions are actuated through servomotors. In addition to the actuators, the arm is equipped with a potentiometer in each joint for detecting joint angle changes. Simulation and experimental results for closed-loop position control are also presented in the article.

Optically detected magnetic resonance of nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond offers novel routes to both DC and AC magnetometry in diamond anvil cells under high pressures ($>3$ GPa). However, a serious challenge to realizing experiments has been the insertion of microwave radiation in to the sample space without screening by the gasket material. We utilize designer anvils with lithographically-deposited metallic microchannels on the diamond culet as a microwave antenna. We detected the spin resonance of an ensemble of microdiamonds under pressure, and measure the pressure dependence of the zero field splitting parameters. These experiments enable the possibility for all-optical magnetic resonance experiments on sub-$\mu$L sample volumes at high pressures.

As the number of rocket bodies and other debris in Earth's orbit increases, the need to capture and remove this space junk becomes essential to protect new satellites. A low cost solution may include gecko-inspired directional adhesives, which require almost no compressive preload to generate adhesion and are therefore suitable for surface grasping in space where objects are free floating. Current individual adhesive units with a pair of opposed pads achieve a limit of 13N normal to the surface. Instead of using a single large unit to generate high levels of adhesion, using multiple small gripper units is desirable to prevent single-point failures and to conform to higher curvatures. For this strategy to succeed, it is essential to distribute the overall force evenly, to minimize the overall preload normal to the surface, and to prevent local failures from propagating over the array. We present two load sharing mechanisms. The first uses nearly-constant force springs in parallel. The second uses a tendon and pulleys in series. Both allow a 4-unit gripper to maintain the same adhesive stress as a single unit. A normal adhesive load to compressive preload ratio of 100:1 is demonstrated. Zero gravity experiments and air bearing floor experiments demonstrate the gripper's functionality in a simulated space environment. Design considerations are discussed for further scaling, with the trade-offs among load sharing, suitability for different surfaces, and failure sensitivity.

A rock‐climbing robot is presented that can free climb on vertical, overhanging, and inverted rock faces. This type of system has applications to extreme terrain on Mars or for sustained mobility on microgravity bodies. The robot grips the rock using hierarchical arrays of microspines. Microspines are compliant mechanisms made of sharp hooks and flexible elements that allow the hooks to move independently and opportunistically grasp roughness on the surface of a rock. This paper presents many improvements to early microspine grippers, and the application of these new grippers to a four‐limbed robotic system, LEMUR IIB. Each gripper has over 250 microspines distributed in 16 carriages. Carriages also move independently with compliance to conform to larger, cm‐scale roughness. Single gripper pull testing on a variety of rock types is presented, and on rough rocks, a single gripper can support the entire mass of the robot (10 kg) in any orientation. Several sensor combinations for the grippers were evaluated using a smaller test‐gripper. Rock‐climbing mobility experiments are also described for three characteristic gravitational orientations. Finally, a sample acquisition tool that uses one of the robot's grippers to enable rotary percussive drilling is shown.