2-DoF Vibrational Manipulation

This work was presented at ICRA 2026 and builds on prior work. In that work, the use of impact motors complicated the vibrating surface’s dynamic response, and made it difficult to systematically study how vibration waveform parameters affect transport velocity. Here, we replaced those motors with controllable voice coil actuators (VCAs) driven by a closed-loop position controller. This not only allowed us to precisely characterize the relationship between waveform parameters and average part velocity, but also perform controlled, higher-DoF surface vibrations. Namely, we extended from 1-DoF transport to a 2-DoF output surface capable of both translation and in-plane rotation. Our main contributions are:

1. Demonstrating vertical vibratory transport and part rotation in the presence of gravity without relying on impact-based accelerations
2. Characterizing and experimentally validating how the sticking acceleration $a_s$ and maximum slipping acceleration $a_{max}$ affect average part velocity

Two of these 2-DoF fingers were integrated into a parallel jaw gripper, which bidirectionally translated and rotated a diverse range of grasped parts.