Related papers: Programming Soft Robots with Flexible Mechanical M…
Dynamic motions are a key feature of robotic arms, enabling them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Soft continuum manipulators do not currently consider dynamic parameters when operating in task space. This shortcoming makes…
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…
Reconfigurable robot swarms are capable of connecting with each other to form complex structures. Current mechanical or magnetic connection mechanisms can be complicated to manufacture, consume high power, have a limited load-bearing…
Soft robots can execute tasks with safer interactions. However, control techniques that can effectively exploit the systems' capabilities are still missing. Differential dynamic programming (DDP) has emerged as a promising tool for…
Soft machines are poised to deliver significant real-world impact, with soft robotics emerging as a key sub-discipline. This field integrates biological inspiration, materials science, and embodied intelligence to create bio-robotic…
Developable surfaces are commonly observed in various applications such as architecture, product design, manufacturing, mechanical materials, and data physicalization as well as in the development of tangible interaction and deformable…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Motion control of droplets has generated much attention for its applications to microfluidics, where precise control of small fluid volumes is an imperative requirement. Mechanical vibrations have been shown to be effective at inducing…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
This document aims at specifying the requirements and capturing the needs of users for building a softbody simulation system. This system has different applications ranging from computer games to surgery training which facilitates the…
We describe opportunities and challenges with wireless robotic materials. Robotic materials are multi-functional composites that tightly integrate sensing, actuation, computation and communication to create smart composites that can sense…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the…
To achieve real-world functionality, robots must have the ability to carry out decision-making computations. However, soft robots stretch and therefore need a solution other than rigid computers. Examples of embedding computing capacity…
Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…
We present a user-friendly interface to teleoperate a soft robot manipulator in a complex environment. Key components of the system include a manipulator with a grasping end-effector that grows via tip eversion, gesture-based control, and…
Granular metamaterials are a promising choice for the realization of mechanical computing devices. As preliminary evidence of this, we demonstrate here how to embed Boolean logic gates (AND and XOR) into a granular metamaterial by evolving…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting on precisely-targeted cells in biological tissues. Some tasks may benefit from robots that change shape, such as elongating to improve chemical gradient…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…