Related papers: Exploiting short-term memory in soft body dynamics…
Practical use of robotic manipulators made from soft materials requires generating and executing complex motions. We present the first approach for generating trajectories of a thermally-actuated soft robotic manipulator. Based on…
Due to the visual ambiguity, purely kinematic formulations on monocular human motion capture are often physically incorrect, biomechanically implausible, and can not reconstruct accurate interactions. In this work, we focus on exploiting…
Non-contact laser ablation, a precise thermal technique, simultaneously cuts and coagulates tissue without the insertion errors associated with rigid needles. Human organ motions, such as those in the liver, exhibit rhythmic components…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
From the nano-scale to the macro-scale, biological tissue is spatially heterogeneous. Even when tissue behavior is well understood, the exact subject specific spatial distribution of material properties is often unknown. And, when…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
This paper presents a new method for modelling the dynamic behaviour of developable ribbons, two dimensional strips with much smaller width than length. Instead of approximating such surface with a general triangle mesh, we characterize it…
Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and…
Accurate manipulation of a deformable body such as a piece of fabric is difficult because of its many degrees of freedom and unobservable properties affecting its dynamics. To alleviate these challenges, we propose the application of…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…
Use of physics-based simulation as a planning model enables a planner to reason and generate plans that involve non-trivial interactions with the world. For example, grasping a milk container out of a cluttered refrigerator may involve…
Soft robotic grippers are shown to be high effective for grasping unstructured objects with simple sensing and control strategies. However, they are still limited by their speed, sensing capabilities and actuation mechanism. Hence, their…
Grasping deformable objects is not well researched due to the complexity in modelling and simulating the dynamic behavior of such objects. However, with the rapid development of physics-based simulators that support soft bodies, the…
We automate soft robotic hand design iteration by co-optimizing design and control policy for dexterous manipulation skills in simulation. Our design iteration pipeline combines genetic algorithms and policy transfer to learn control…
Soft robotics technologies have gained growing interest in recent years, which allows various applications from manufacturing to human-robot interaction. Pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM), a typical soft actuator, has been widely applied to…
In this paper, a reinforced soft robot prototype with a custom-designed actuator-space string encoder are created to investigate dynamic soft robotic trajectory tracking. The soft robot prototype embedded with the proposed adaptive…
Simulating soft robots in cluttered environments remains an open problem due to the challenge of capturing complex dynamics and interactions with the environment. Furthermore, fast simulation is desired for quickly exploring robot behaviors…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…
Reverse engineering the brain is proving difficult, perhaps impossible. While many believe that this is just a matter of time and effort, a different approach might help. Here, we describe a very simple idea which explains the power of the…