TY - CPAPER AB - For the majority of tasks performed by traditionalserial robot arms, such as bin picking or pick and place, onlytwo or three degrees of freedom (DOF) are required for motion;however, by augmenting the number of degrees of freedom,further dexterity of robot arms for multiple tasks can beachieved. Instead of increasing the number of joints of a robotto improve flexibility and adaptation, which increases controlcomplexity, weight, and cost of the overall system, malleablerobots utilise a variable stiffness link between joints allowing therelative positioning of the revolute pairs at each end of the linkto vary, thus enabling a low DOF serial robot to adapt acrosstasks by varying its workspace. In this paper, we present thedesign and prototyping of a 2-DOF malleable robot, calculatethe general equation of its workspace using a parameterisationbased on distance geometry—suitable for robot arms of variabletopology, and characterise the workspace categories that theend effector of the robot can trace via reconfiguration. Throughthe design and construction of the malleable robot we exploredesign considerations, and demonstrate the viability of theoverall concept. By using motion tracking on the physical robot,we show examples of the infinite number of workspaces thatthe introduced 2-DOF malleable robot can achieve. AU - Clark,A AU - Rojas,N DO - 10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197439 EP - 9027 PB - IEEE PY - 2020/// SP - 9021 TI - Design and workspace characterisation of malleable robots UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197439 UR - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9197439 UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/77596 ER -