Papers

Making Waves: A Membrane-Coupled Delta Array for Manipulating Objects Below the Actuator Spacing

This preprint presents an 8×8 array of 64 three-degree-of-freedom delta robots coupled by a stretchable membrane, creating a continuous surface that can manipulate objects both larger and smaller than the 43.3 mm actuator spacing. On real hardware, a learned policy transferred from simulation and succeeded on 76% of 50 trials across objects from 30 to 90 mm, while local hand-designed primitives routed 15 mm cubes at 7.6 mm/s. The work matters because it removes the centre-to-centre spacing lower bound on object size for distributed manipulation.