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Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Object grasping is an important ability required for various robot tasks. In particular, tasks that require precise force adjustments during operation, such as grasping an unknown object or using a grasped tool, are difficult for humans to…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Most prior research in deep imitation learning has predominantly utilized fixed cameras for image input, which constrains task performance to the predefined field of view. However, enabling a robot to actively maneuver its neck can…
This paper introduces an innovative control approach for teleoperating a robot in close proximity to a human operator, which could be useful to control robots embedded on wheelchairs. The method entails establishing a virtual connection…
The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the…
Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new…
The robotic manipulation of deformable linear objects has shown great potential in a wide range of real-world applications. However, it presents many challenges due to the objects' complex nonlinearity and high-dimensional configuration. In…
Clay sculpting is a nuanced, artistic task involving dexterous manipulation with long-horizon planning to achieve high-level goals. As a robotics problem, we formulate clay sculpting as a shape-to-shape matching challenge. Prior deformable…
Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents a new design and development of a tank-like robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs,…
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
Collaborative robots must simultaneously be safe enough to operate in close proximity to human operators and powerful enough to assist users in industrial tasks such as lifting heavy equipment. The requirement for safety necessitates that…
Robots are increasingly envisioned as human companions, assisting with everyday tasks that often involve manipulating deformable objects. Although recent advances in robotic hardware and embodied AI have expanded their capabilities, current…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
The Hair clip mechanism (HCM) is an in-plane prestressed bistable mechanism proposed in our previous research [1]~[5] to enhance the functionality of soft robotics. HCMs have several advantages, such as high rigidity, high mobility, good…
Manipulation of deformable objects is a desired skill in making robots ubiquitous in manufacturing, service, healthcare, and security. Deformable objects are common in our daily lives, e.g., wires, clothes, bed sheets, etc., and are…
This paper studies the problem of using a robot arm to manipulate a uniformly rotating chain with its bottom end fixed. Existing studies have investigated ideal rotational shapes for practical applications, yet they do not discuss how these…
Many robotic tasks involving some form of 3D visual perception greatly benefit from a complete knowledge of the working environment. However, robots often have to tackle unstructured environments and their onboard visual sensors can only…
In this paper we tackle the problem of deformable object manipulation through model-free visual reinforcement learning (RL). In order to circumvent the sample inefficiency of RL, we propose two key ideas that accelerate learning. First, we…