Related papers: Category theory as a foundation for soft robotics
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…
Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…
Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings. In this…
We develop foundations for oriented category theory, an extension of $(\infty,\infty)$-category theory obtained by systematic usage of the Gray tensor product, in order to study lax phenomena in higher category theory. As categorical…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
The unprecedented pace of machine learning research has lead to incredible advances, but also poses hard challenges. At present, the field lacks strong theoretical underpinnings, and many important achievements stem from ad hoc design…
Robotic grasp and manipulation taxonomies, inspired by observing human manipulation strategies, can provide key guidance for tasks ranging from robotic gripper design to the development of manipulation algorithms. The existing grasp and…
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 argue that hardware modularity plays a key role in the convergence of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce a new approach for building robots that leads to more adaptable and capable machines. We present the concept of…
Soft robotic manipulators provide numerous advantages over conventional rigid manipulators in fragile environments such as the marine environment. However, developing analytic inverse models necessary for shape, motion, and force control of…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Robot learning provides a number of ways to teach robots simple skills, such as grasping. However, these skills are usually trained in open, clutter-free environments, and therefore would likely cause undesirable collisions in more complex,…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
As robot make their way out of factories into human environments, outer space, and beyond, they require the skill to manipulate their environment in multifarious, unforeseeable circumstances. With this regard, pushing is an essential motion…
One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
Fine robotic assembly, in which the parts to be assembled are small and fragile and lie in an unstructured environment, is still out of reach of today's industrial robots. The main difficulties arise in the precise localization of the parts…
Recently, suction-based robotic systems with microscopic features or active suction components have been proposed to grip rough and irregular surfaces. However, sophisticated fabrication methods or complex control systems are required for…