Related papers: Measuring information transfer in a soft robotic a…
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…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Robotic manipulation has made significant advancements, with systems demonstrating high precision and repeatability. However, this remarkable precision often fails to translate into efficient manipulation of thin deformable objects. Current…
The main contribution of this paper is a novel sensory feedback control law for an octopus arm. The control law is inspired by, and helps integrate, several observations made by biologists. The proposed control law is distinct from prior…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
Recently, the permutation-information theoretic approach has been used in a broad range of research fields. In particular, in the study of highdimensional dynamical systems, it has been shown that this approach can be effective in…
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…
Over the past decades, we have witnessed a rapid emergence of soft and reconfigurable robots thanks to their capability to interact safely with humans and adapt to complex environments. However, their softness makes accurate control very…
Impact-aware robotic manipulation benefits from an accurate map from ante-impact to post-impact velocity signals to support, e.g., motion planning and control. This work proposes an approach to generate and experimentally validate such…
Animals achieve sophisticated behavioral control through dynamic coupling of the brain, body, and environment. Accordingly, the co-design approach, in which both the controllers and the physical properties are optimized simultaneously, has…
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Biological systems, such as the octopus, exhibit masterful cross-scale manipulation by adaptively reconfiguring their entire form, a capability that remains elusive in robotics. Conventional soft grippers, while compliant, are mostly…
We consider a team of heterogeneous robots which are deployed within a common workspace to gather different types of data. The robots have different roles due to different capabilities: some gather data from the workspace (source robots)…
While its biological significance is well-documented, its application in soft robotics, particularly for the transport of fragile and irregularly shaped objects, remains underexplored. This study presents a modular soft robotic actuator…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
In this work, we introduce an adaptive control framework for human-robot collaborative transportation of objects with unknown deformation behaviour. The proposed framework takes as input the haptic information transmitted through the…
In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…
Robots must move legibly around people for safety reasons, especially for tasks where physical contact is possible. One such task is handovers, which requires implicit communication on where and when physical contact (object transfer)…
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…
A dynamic autonomy allocation framework automatically shifts how much control lies with the human versus the robotics autonomy, for example based on factors such as environmental safety or user preference. To investigate the question of…