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Shape-morphing robots have shown benefits in industrial grasping. We propose form-flexible grippers for adaptive grasping. The design is based on the hybrid jamming and suction mechanism, which deforms to handle objects that vary…
Soft parallel robots with their manipulation safety and low commercial cost show a promising future for delicate operations and safe human-robot interactions. However, promoting the use of electroactive polymers (EAPs) is still challenging…
Hand-wearable robots, specifically exoskeletons, are designed to aid hands in daily activities, playing a crucial role in post-stroke rehabilitation and assisting the elderly. Our contribution to this field is a textile robotic glove with…
We report on the fabrication and characterization of an optimized comb-drive actuator design for strain-dependent transport measurements on suspended graphene. We fabricate devices from highly p-doped silicon using deep reactive ion etching…
Electrically-driven soft robots based on piezoelectric actuators may enable compact form factors and maneuverability in complex environments. In most prior work, piezoelectric actuators are used to control a single degree of freedom. In…
Soft pneumatic robot manipulators are popular in industrial and human-interactive applications due to their compliance and flexibility. However, deploying them in real-world scenarios requires advanced sensing for tactile feedback and…
Soft and lightweight grippers have greatly enhanced the performance of robotic manipulators in handling complex objects with varying shape, texture, and stiffness. However, the combination of universal grasping with passive sensing…
Self-regulated actuators harness material intelligence to enable complex deformations and dynamics, representing a significant advancement in automated soft robotics. However, investigations on self-regulated soft actuators, particularly…
Stiffness variation and real-time position feedback are critical for any robotic system but most importantly for active and wearable devices to interact with the user and environment. Currently, for compact sizes, there is a lack of…
Soft robotic grippers facilitate contact-rich manipulation, including robust grasping of varied objects. Yet the beneficial compliance of a soft gripper also results in significant deformation that can make precision manipulation…
A GelSight sensor uses an elastomeric slab covered with a reflective membrane to measure tactile signals. It measures the 3D geometry and contact force information with high spacial resolution, and successfully helped many challenging robot…
Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Soft robotics is advancing the use of flexible materials for adaptable robotic systems. Membrane-actuated soft robots address the limitations of traditional soft robots by using pressurized, extensible membranes to achieve stable, large…
Soft robots are interesting examples of hyper-redundancy in robotics, however, the nonlinear continuous dynamics of these robots and the use of hyper-elastic and visco-elastic materials makes modeling of these robots more complicated. This…
Dexterous manipulation, especially of small daily objects, continues to pose complex challenges in robotics. This paper introduces the DenseTact-Mini, an optical tactile sensor with a soft, rounded, smooth gel surface and compact design…
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…
Miniature robots are untethered actuators, which have significant potential to make existing minimally invasive surgery considerably safer and painless, and enable unprecedented treatments because they are much smaller and dexterous than…
Various fields, including medical and human interaction robots, gain advantages from the development of bioinspired soft actuators. Many recently developed grippers are pneumatics that require external pressure supply systems, thereby…
We have designed and tested experimentally a morphing structure consisting of a neutrally stable thin cylindrical shell driven by a multiparameter piezoelectric actuation. The shell is obtained by plastically deforming an initially flat…