Related papers: Deformation Capture via Soft and Stretchable Senso…
Flexible sensors are increasingly employed in soft robotics and wearable devices to provide proprioception of freeform deformations.Although supervised learning can train shape predictors from sensor signals, prediction accuracy strongly…
Reliable real-time 3D shape sensing is essential for robust control and interpretation of deformable systems during motion. Existing vision-based approaches require line-of-sight and complex instrumentation, limiting operation in occluded…
The last few decades have witnessed an emerging trend of wearable soft sensors; however, there are important signal-processing challenges for soft sensors that still limit their practical deployment. They are error-prone when displaced,…
Soft bodies made from flexible and deformable materials are popular in many robotics applications, but their proprioceptive sensing has been a long-standing challenge. In other words, there has hardly been a method to measure and model the…
Accurate shape sensing, only achievable through distributed proprioception, is a key requirement for closed-loop control of soft robots. Low-cost power efficient optoelectronic sensors manufactured from flexible materials represent a…
Wearable devices are becoming increasingly important, addressing needs in both the fitness and the medical markets. In this paper, we describe a novel sensing platform based on a hollow-core polyurethane optical fiber, operating through…
Tactile sensing can provide access to information about the contact (i.e. slippage, surface feature, friction), which is out of reach of vision but crucial for manipulation. To access this information, a dense measurement of the deformation…
Accurately digitizing physical objects is central to many applications, including virtual/augmented reality, industrial design, and e-commerce. Prior research has demonstrated efficient and faithful reconstruction of objects' geometric…
Haptic sensation is an important modality for interacting with the real world. This paper proposes a general framework of inferring haptic forces on the surface of a 3D structure from internal deformations using a small number of physical…
While robotic manipulation of rigid objects is quite straightforward, coping with deformable objects is an open issue. More specifically, tasks like tying a knot, wiring a connector or even surgical suturing deal with the domain of…
Deformable objects often appear in unstructured configurations. Tracing deformable objects helps bringing them into extended states and facilitating the downstream manipulation tasks. Due to the requirements for object-specific modeling or…
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…
Industrial assembly of deformable linear objects (DLOs) such as cables offers great potential for many industries. However, DLOs pose several challenges for robot-based automation due to the inherent complexity of deformation and,…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
Reconstructing the three-dimensional (3D) geometry of object surfaces is essential for robot perception, yet vision-based approaches are generally unreliable under low illumination or occlusion. This limitation motivates the design of a…
We present FluxLab, a system comprising interactive tools for creating custom 3D-printable shape-changing devices with integrated deformation sensing. To achieve this, we propose a 3D printable nesting structure, consisting of a central SMA…
Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
In this paper, we propose a general unified tracking-servoing approach for controlling the shape of elastic deformable objects using robotic arms. Our approach works by forming a lattice around the object, binding the object to the lattice,…
In minimal invasive surgery, it is important to rebuild and visualize the latest deformed shape of soft-tissue surfaces to mitigate tissue damages. This paper proposes an innovative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm for…