Related papers: Development of a Tendon Driven Variable Stiffness …
Reinforcement-learned locomotion enables legged robots to perform highly dynamic motions but often accompanies time-consuming manual tuning of joint stiffness. This paper introduces a novel control paradigm that integrates variable…
Tensegrity robots excel in tasks requiring extreme levels of deformability and robustness. However, there are challenges in state estimation and payload versatility due to their high number of degrees of freedom and unconventional shape.…
Vine-inspired robots achieve large workspace coverage through tip eversion, enabling safe navigation in confined and cluttered environments. However, their deployment in free space is fundamentally limited by low axial stiffness, poor…
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…
Attempts to install a rotating tool at the end of a robot arm poly-articulated date back twenty years, but these robots were not designed for that. Indeed, two essential features are necessary for machining: high rigidity and precision in a…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Soft robot arms have made significant progress towards completing human-scale tasks, but designing arms for tasks with specific load and workspace requirements remains difficult. A key challenge is the lack of model-based design tools,…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
3D-printed bellow soft pneumatic arms are widely adopted for their flexible design, ease of fabrication, and large deformation capabilities. However, their low stiffness limits their real-world applications. Although several methods exist…
Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
Tendon-actuated concentric tube mechanisms combine the advantages of tendon-driven continuum robots and concentric tube robots while addressing their respective limitations. They overcome the restricted degrees of freedom often seen in…
We present a new open-source torque-controlled legged robot system, with a low-cost and low-complexity actuator module at its core. It consists of a high-torque brushless DC motor and a low-gear-ratio transmission suitable for impedance and…
Stroke-induced motor impairment often results in substantial loss of upper-limb function, creating a strong demand for rehabilitation robots that enable safe and transparent physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). Variable stiffness…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Robotic arms are essential to modern industries, however, their adaptability to unstructured environments remains limited. Soft robotic arms, particularly those actuated pneumatically, offer greater adaptability in unstructured environments…
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…
This paper introduces a Cosserat rod based mathematical model for modeling a self-controllable variable curvature soft continuum robot. This soft continuum robot has a hollow inner channel and was developed with the ability to perform…
An accurate, physically-based, and differentiable model of soft robots can unlock downstream applications in optimal control. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is an expressive approach for modeling highly deformable structures such as…
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…