Compliant actuation bestows robots with the ability to cope with unstructured environments, move with agility, and interact safely with humans at the expense of reduced tracking accuracy. The inclusion of dampening components aims to reduce oscillatory dynamics and partially restore precision without sacrificing the previously obtained characteristics. This paper introduces the concept and design of a novel damped compliant actuator suitable for building multi-degree of freedom systems. The proposed unit has a unique actuator topology that has never been seen before in the literature. The gearbox is used as a differential component, allowing the design of compact units without giving up safety and accuracy enhancements. We present and analyze the actuator's model and experimentally characterize the actuator prototype and the elastic and damping component.

Frequently, ground robots are hampered by debris and objects on the ground, and safely surpassing them is not always trivial. On the contrary, a robot capable of flying is intrinsically immune to such obstacles and, therefore, greatly enhances the possibility of inspecting and intervening in adverse surroundings for humans. This work introduces a novel teleoperated aerial platform for inspection and intervention in unstructured environments. The robot is composed of an aerial base, two arms, and a two-degrees-of-freedom head that consent the access of human operators in any workplace in total safety. The arms are designed with a joint structure of tendons and are held by elastic components. This composition considerably improves the robustness by inserting softness and redistributing the weights to lessen the actions on the drone. Moreover, the aerial platform employs two soft hands capable of adapting to the shape of the objects under grasp, increasing the manipulation performance. We presented the mechanical and control design, a gazebo simulation employed to test the controllers, and a physical structure for the experimental validation of the system. The system is available as Open-Source material.