The Quadruped Soft Tail: Compliant Grasping and Swabbing for Contamination Surveys in Harsh Environments

arXiv:2606.30900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Beryllium contamination surveys in radioactive areas are challenging for robots in environments cluttered with cables and electronics. To address this problem, we have developed a novel quadruped system augmentation: A lightweight, soft, and compliant tendon-actuated robotic tail mounted on a quadruped robot. The tail features a hollow, flexible backbone and a tendon-actuated soft gripper that enables the robot to pick up sampling tissues, swab con...