Related papers: Efficient Reduced-Order Models for Soft Actuators
Soft robot arms have made significant progress towards completing human-scale tasks, but designing arms for tasks with specific load and workspace requirements remains difficult. A key challenge is the lack of model-based design tools,…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
Recent years have seen soft robotic grippers gain increasing attention due to their ability to robustly grasp soft and fragile objects. However, a commonly available standardised evaluation protocol has not yet been developed to assess the…
Soft robots promise improved safety and capability over rigid robots when deployed in complex, delicate, and dynamic environments. However, the infinite degrees of freedom and highly nonlinear dynamics of these systems severely complicate…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…
Biological agents possess bodies that are mostly of soft tissues. Researchers have resorted to soft bodies to investigate Artificial Life (ALife)-related questions; similarly, a new era of soft-bodied robots has just begun. Nevertheless,…
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…
Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
We present a mm-scale optical fiber strain sensor to continuously measure the food deformation below the surface during the drying process. The sensor has a soft buffer sleeve, which enables a large measurable deformation range and…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
Dynamic in-hand manipulation remains a challenging task for soft robotic systems that have demonstrated advantages in safe compliant interactions but struggle with high-speed dynamic tasks. In this work, we present SWIFT, a system for…
While rigid robots are extensively used in various applications, they are limited in the tasks they can perform and can be unsafe in close human-robot interactions. Soft robots on the other hand surpass the capabilities of rigid robots in…
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation…
Although strain-based models have been widely adopted in robotics, no comparison beyond the uniform bending test is commonly recognized to assess their performance. In addition, the increasing effort in prototyping continuum robots…
Reinforcement learning often requires extensive training data. Simulation-to-real transfer offers a promising approach to address this challenge in robotics. While differentiable simulators offer improved sample efficiency through exact…
Roboticists have been seeking to address this situation in recent years through the use of soft robots. Unfortunately, identifying appropriate models for the complete analysis and investigation of soft robots for design and control purposes…
Increasing the performance of tactile sensing in robots enables versatile, in-hand manipulation. Vision-based tactile sensors have been widely used as rich tactile feedback has been shown to be correlated with increased performance in…
Soft robots - due to their intrinsic flexibility of the body - can adaptively navigate unstructured environments. One of the most popular locomotion gaits that has been implemented in soft robots is undulation. The undulation motion in soft…
Soft robotics has emerged as a transformative technology in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations, addressing challenges in navigating complex, hazardous environments that often limit traditional rigid robots. This paper critically examines…