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Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Ergonomics is a key factor to consider when designing control architectures for effective physical collaborations between humans and humanoid robots. In contrast, ergonomic indexes are often overlooked in the robot design phase, which leads…
Soft robotic manipulators provide numerous advantages over conventional rigid manipulators in fragile environments such as the marine environment. However, developing analytic inverse models necessary for shape, motion, and force control of…
Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…
Design optimization of mechanisms is a promising research area as it results in more energy-efficient machines without compromising performance. However, machine builders do not actually use the potential described in the literature as…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
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…
Bio-inspired soft robots have already shown the ability to handle uncertainty and adapt to unstructured environments. However, their availability is partially restricted by time-consuming, costly and highly supervised design-fabrication…
Robotic cloth folding is a challenging task, particularly when considering dynamic folding tasks, which aim at folding cloth by fast motions that leverage its dynamics. When subject to such fast motions, the complexity of cloth dynamics…
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…
Robot hands that imitate the shape of the human body have been actively studied, and various materials and mechanisms have been proposed to imitate the human body. Although the use of soft materials is advantageous in that it can imitate…
Dynamic modeling and control are critical for unleashing soft robots' potential, yet remain challenging due to their complex constitutive behaviors and real-world operating conditions. Bio-inspired musculoskeletal robots, which integrate…
Soft robots have many advantages over rigid robots thanks to their compliant and passive nature. However, it is generally challenging to model the dynamics of soft robots due to their high spatial dimensionality, making it difficult to use…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Background The development of a simulation model of full body reaching tasks that can predict endeffector trajectories and joint excursions consistent with experimental data is a non-trivial task. Because of the kinematic redundancy…
Numerical optimization has become a popular approach to plan smooth motion trajectories for robots. However, when sharing space with humans, balancing properly safety, comfort and efficiency still remains challenging. This is notably the…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…
The predictive functions that permit humans to infer their body state by sensorimotor integration are critical to perform safe interaction in complex environments. These functions are adaptive and robust to non-linear actuators and noisy…
In this paper, a computationally efficient data-driven hybrid automaton model is proposed to capture unknown complex dynamical system behaviors using multiple neural networks. The sampled data of the system is divided by valid partitions…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…