Related papers: Programming Soft Robots with Flexible Mechanical M…
Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and healthcare…
Previous mechanical meta-structures used for mechanical memory storage, computing and information processing are severely constrained by low information density and/or non-robust structural stiffness to stably protect the maintained…
Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional counterpart of metamaterials, have caught great attention thanks to their powerful control over electromagnetic waves. Recent times have seen the emergence of a variety of metasurfaces exhibiting not only…
The ignition of flammable liquids and gases in offshore oil and gas environments is a major risk and can cause loss of life, serious injury, and significant damage to infrastructure. Power supplies that are used to provide regulated…
Mechanical metamaterials composed of bistable elements have recently emerged as promising platforms for mechanical memory. Traditional approaches to writing information in these systems typically rely on localized actuation or predefined…
Swimming microrobots are increasingly developed with complex materials and dynamic shapes and are expected to operate in complex environments in which the system dynamics are difficult to model and positional control of the microrobot is…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
The rapid design and fabrication of soft robotic matter is of growing interest for shape morphing, actuation, and wearable devices. Here, we report a facile fabrication method for creating soft robotic materials with embedded pneumatics…
Manipulating deformable objects has long been a challenge in robotics due to its high dimensional state representation and complex dynamics. Recent success in deep reinforcement learning provides a promising direction for learning to…
Soft robots offer adaptability and safe interaction with complex environments. Rapid prototyping kits that allow soft robots to be assembled easily will allow different geometries to be explored quickly to suit different environments or to…
The architecture of mechanical metamaterialsis designed to harness geometry, non-linearity and topology to obtain advanced functionalities such as shape morphing, programmability and one-way propagation. While a purely geometric framework…
Soft robot serial chain manipulators with the capability for growth, stiffness control, and discrete joints have the potential to approach the dexterity of traditional robot arms, while improving safety, lowering cost, and providing an…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
Single locomotion robots often struggle to adapt in highly variable or uncertain environments, especially in emergencies. In this paper, a multi-modal deformable robot is introduced that can both fly and drive. Compatibility issues with…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
Sensors play a fundamental role in achieving the complex behaviors typically found in biological organisms. However, their potential role in the design of artificial agents is often overlooked. This often results in the design of robots…
We study the sense in which the continuum limit of a broad class of discrete materials with periodic structures can be viewed as a nonlinear elastic material. While we are not the first to consider this question, our treatment is more…
Soft Robotics presents a rich canvas for free-form and continuum devices capable of exerting forces in any direction and transforming between arbitrary configurations. However, there is no current way to tractably and directly exploit the…
The advent of 3D printing has revolutionized many industries and has had similar improvements for soft robots. However, many challenges persist for these functional devices. Magnetic soft robots require the addition of magnetic particles…
Humans are able to outperform robots in terms of robustness, versatility, and learning of new tasks in a wide variety of movements. We hypothesize that highly nonlinear muscle dynamics play a large role in providing inherent stability,…