Related papers: Optimal Dexterity for a Snake-like Surgical Manipu…

We optimize three-dimensional snake kinematics for locomotor efficiency. We assume a general space-curve representation of the snake backbone with small-to-moderate lifting off the ground and negligible body inertia. The cost of locomotion…

Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…

Surgeons normally need surgical scissors and tissue grippers to cut through a deformable surgical tissue. The cutting accuracy depends on the skills to manipulate these two tools. Such skills are part of basic surgical skills training as in…

We present an interactive, computational design system for creating custom robotic arms given high-level task descriptions and environmental constraints. Various task requirements can be encoded as desired motion trajectories for the robot…

Dexterous robotic manipulation in unstructured environments can aid in everyday tasks such as cleaning and caretaking. Anthropomorphic robotic hands are highly dexterous and theoretically well-suited for working in human domains, but their…

Dexterous manipulation is a fundamental capability for robotic systems, yet progress has been limited by hardware trade-offs between precision, compactness, strength, and affordability. Existing control methods impose compromises on hand…

Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery is improving surgeon performance and patient outcomes. This innovation is also turning what has been a subjective practice into motion sequences that can be precisely measured. A growing number of…

Despite advances in dexterous hand manipulation, robotic hand design is still largely decoupled from task-driven evaluation and control, limiting systematic optimization. Existing robotic hand co-design approaches are often limited in…

Modular robots can be tailored to achieve specific tasks and rearranged to achieve previously infeasible ones. The challenge is choosing an appropriate design from a large search space. In this work, we describe a framework that…

Robot arm placements are oftentimes a limitation in surgical preoperative procedures, relying on trained staff to evaluate and decide on the optimal positions for the arms. Given new and different patient anatomies, it can be challenging to…

Multi-step dexterous manipulation is a fundamental skill in household scenarios, yet remains an underexplored area in robotics. This paper proposes a modular approach, where each step of the manipulation process is addressed with dedicated…

During retinal microsurgery, precise manipulation of the delicate retinal tissue is required for positive surgical outcome. However, accurate manipulation and navigation of surgical tools remain difficult due to a constrained workspace and…

Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…

Balancing oneself using the spine is a physiological alignment of the body posture in the most efficient manner by the muscular forces for mammals. For this reason, we can see many disabled quadruped animals can still stand or walk even…

Recent advancements in constrained kinematic control make it an attractive strategy for controlling robots with arbitrary geometry in challenging tasks. Most current works assume that the robot kinematic model is precise enough for the task…

We introduce a novel approach that combines tactile estimation and control for in-hand object manipulation. By integrating measurements from robot kinematics and an image-based tactile sensor, our framework estimates and tracks object pose…

Inverse kinematics is a fundamental problem for articulated robots: fast and accurate algorithms are needed for translating task-related workspace constraints and goals into feasible joint configurations. In general, inverse kinematics for…

Robotic suturing is a prototypical long-horizon dexterous manipulation task, requiring coordinated needle grasping, precise tissue penetration, and secure knot tying. Despite numerous efforts toward end-to-end autonomy, a fully autonomous…

Design of active orthosis is a challenging problem from both the dynamic simulation and control points of view. The redundancy problem of the simultaneous human-orthosis actuation is an interesting exercise to solve concerning the…

Traditional control and task automation have been successfully demonstrated in a variety of structured, controlled environments through the use of highly specialized modeled robotic systems in conjunction with multiple sensors. However, the…