Related papers: Exploiting short-term memory in soft body dynamics…

This study demonstrates that the soft biological tissues of humans can be used as a type of soft body in physical reservoir computing. Soft biological tissues possess characteristics such as stress-strain nonlinearity and viscoelasticity…

Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…

Soft robots can exhibit diverse behaviors with simple types of actuation by partially outsourcing control to the morphological and material properties of their soft bodies, which is made possible by the tight coupling between control, body,…

Soft Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, can be considered as the "dual" of traditional rigid-bodied robots in terms of manipulability, degrees of freedom, and compliance. Introduced two decades ago, continuum arms have not…

Soft machines display shape adaptation to external circumstances due to their intrinsic compliance. To achieve increasingly more responsive behaviors upon interactions without relying on centralized computation, embodying memory directly in…

Active soft bodies can affect their shape through an internal actuation mechanism that induces a deformation. Similar to recent work, this paper utilizes a differentiable, quasi-static, and physics-based simulation layer to optimize for…

Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…

Control of soft robotic manipulators remains a challenge for designs with advanced capabilities and novel actuation. Two significant limitations are multi-axis, three-dimensional motion of soft bodies alongside actuator dynamics and…

Discrete simulation methods are efficient tools to investigate the complex behaviors of complex fluids made of either dry granular materials or dilute suspensions. By contrast, materials made of soft and/or concentrated units (emulsions,…

Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…

Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…

Skeletal muscles are living tissues that can undergo large deformations in short periods of time and that can be activated to produce force. In this paper we use the principles of continuum mechanics to propose a dynamic, fully non-linear,…

Human body motions can be captured as a high-dimensional continuous signal using motion sensor technologies. The resulting data can be surprisingly rich in information, even when captured from persons with limited mobility. In this work, we…

This paper describes a 2D and 3D simulation engine that quantitatively models the statics, dynamics, and non-linear deformation of heterogeneous soft bodies in a computationally efficient manner. There is a large body of work simulating…

Accurately modeling soft robots in simulation is computationally expensive and commonly falls short of representing the real world. This well-known discrepancy, known as the sim-to-real gap, can have several causes, such as coarsely…

Soft robots have immense potential given their inherent safety and adaptability, but challenges in soft actuator forces and design constraints have limited scaling up soft robots to larger sizes. Electrothermal shape memory alloy (SMA)…

Soft robots have become increasingly popular for complex manipulation tasks requiring gentle and safe contact. However, their softness makes accurate control challenging, and high-fidelity sensing is a prerequisite to adequate control…

Soft robots are robotic systems made of deformable materials and exhibit unique flexibility that can be exploited for complex environments and tasks. However, their control problem has been considered a challenging subject because they are…

We present emergent mechanical memory storage behavior in soft cellular materials. The cellular materials are a network of soft hyperelastic rods which store shape changes, specifically local indentation. This happens under an applied…

We present SoftSMPL, a learning-based method to model realistic soft-tissue dynamics as a function of body shape and motion. Datasets to learn such task are scarce and expensive to generate, which makes training models prone to overfitting.…