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Aging populations and the rising prevalence of neurological and musculoskeletal disorders increase the demand for wearable mobility assistive devices that are effective, comfortable, and anatomically compatible. Many existing systems use…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Recently, suction-based robotic systems with microscopic features or active suction components have been proposed to grip rough and irregular surfaces. However, sophisticated fabrication methods or complex control systems are required for…
While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
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…
Soft robots are promising for manipulation tasks thanks to their compliance, safety, and high degree of freedom. However, the commonly used bidirectional continuum segment design means soft robotic manipulators only function in a limited…
Soft robotic actuators are safe and adaptable devices with inherent compliance, which makes them attractive for manipulating delicate and complex objects. Researchers have integrated stiff materials into soft actuators to increase their…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
Soft pneumatic actuators are widely used in soft robotics because they can produce large motions while remaining compliant enough to interact safely with objects, environments, and the human body. However, their performance is not solely…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
Grasping a variety of objects remains a key challenge in the development of versatile robotic systems. The human hand is remarkably dexterous, capable of grasping and manipulating objects with diverse shapes, mechanical properties, and…
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…
To design a general-purpose assembly robot system that can handle objects of various shapes, we propose a soft jig that fits to the shapes of assembly parts. The functionality of the soft jig is based on a jamming gripper developed in the…
Soft robotic actuators can simplify the design of controllers when operating in contact-rich environments. Importantly, their passive compliance fundamentally alters contact mechanics by smoothing impacts and distributing forces over large…
This paper presents a novel, modular, cable-driven soft robotic arm featuring multi-segment reconfigurability. The proposed architecture enables a stackable system with independent segment control, allowing scalable adaptation to diverse…
This paper presents a unified framework to analyze the manipulability and compliance of modular soft-rigid hybrid robotic fingers. The approach applies to both hydraulic and pneumatic actuation systems. A Jacobian-based formulation maps…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…