Related papers: Efficient Reduced-Order Models for Soft Actuators
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…
Estimating a soft robot's pose and applied forces, also called proprioception, is crucial for safe interaction of the robot with its environment. However, most solutions for soft robot proprioception use dedicated sensors, particularly for…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…
We present a tactile sensing method enabled by the mechanical compliance of soft robots; an externally attachable photoreflective module reads surface deformation of silicone skin to estimate contact force without embedding tactile…
With soft robotics being increasingly employed in settings demanding high and controlled contact forces, recent research has demonstrated the use of soft robots to estimate or intrinsically sense forces without requiring external sensing…
Series Elastic Actuators provide many benefits in force control of robots in unconstrained environments. These benefits include high force fidelity, extremely low impedance, low friction, and good force control bandwidth. Series Elastic…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) extracts slowly varying features from a quickly varying input signal. It has been successfully applied to modeling the visual receptive fields of the cortical neurons. Sufficient experimental results in…
Pneumatic soft robots are typically fabricated by molding, a manual fabrication process that requires skilled labor. Additive manufacturing has the potential to break this limitation and speed up the fabrication process but struggles with…
Soft robots have been increasingly utilized as sophisticated tools in physical rehabilitation, particularly for assisting patients with neuromotor impairments. However, many soft robotics for rehabilitation applications are characterized by…
The Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) model is the most widely used soft robotic modeling and control. However, the PCC fails to accurately describe the deformation of the soft robots when executing dynamic tasks or interacting with the…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
Goal: A limitation in robotic surgery is the lack of force feedback, due to challenges in suitable sensing techniques. To enhance the perception of the surgeons and precise force rendering, estimation of these forces along with tissue…
Soft robots are challenging to model and control as inherent non-linearities (e.g., elasticity and deformation), often requires complex explicit physics-based analytical modeling (e.g., a priori geometric definitions). While machine…
Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…
In this paper, we study integrated estimation and control of soft robots. A significant challenge in deploying closed loop controllers is reliable proprioception via integrated sensing in soft robots. Despite the considerable advances…
This paper reports a reduced-order modeling framework of bladed disks on a rotating shaft to simulate the vibration signature of faults like cracks in different components aiming towards simulated data-driven machine learning. We have…
Continuum and soft robots can leverage complex actuator shapes to take on useful shapes while actuating only a few of their many degrees of freedom. Continuum robots that also grow increase the range of potential shapes that can be actuated…