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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…
In order to manipulate a deformable object, such as rope or cloth, in unstructured environments, robots need a way to estimate its current shape. However, tracking the shape of a deformable object can be challenging because of the object's…
A current problem in the design of small and lightweight autonomous agricultural robots is how to create sufficient traction on soil to pull an agricultural implement or load. One promising solution is offered by the interlock drive system,…
Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
This paper explores the possibility of improving bilateral robot manipulation task performance through optimizing the robot morphology and configuration of the system through motion. To optimize the design for different scenarios, we select…
In this paper, we introduce a new approach for soft robot shape formation and morphing using approximate distance fields. The method uses concepts from constructive solid geometry, R-functions, to construct an approximate distance function…
Adaptation to various scene configurations and object properties, stability and dexterity in robotic grasping manipulation is far from explored. This work presents an origami-based shape morphing fingertip design to actively tackle the…
Scaling dexterous robot learning is constrained by the difficulty of collecting high-quality demonstrations across diverse operators. Existing wearable interfaces often trade comfort and cross-user adaptability for kinematic fidelity, while…
State estimation of robotic systems is essential to implementing feedback controllers, which usually provide better robustness to modeling uncertainties than open-loop controllers. However, state estimation of soft robots is very…
The agricultural sector is rapidly evolving to meet growing global food demands, yet tasks like fruit and vegetable handling remain labor-intensive, causing inefficiencies and post-harvest losses. Automation, particularly selective…
Despite their growing popularity, swarms of robots remain limited by the operating time of each individual. We present algorithms which allow a human to sculpt a swarm of robots into a shape that persists in space perpetually, independent…
Spider monkeys (genus Ateles) have a prehensile tail that functions as a flexible, multipurpose fifth limb, enabling them to navigate complex terrains, grasp objects of various sizes, and swing between supports. Inspired by the spider…
For the majority of tasks performed by traditional serial robot arms, such as bin picking or pick and place, only two or three degrees of freedom (DOF) are required for motion; however, by augmenting the number of degrees of freedom,…
The robotic shape control of deformable linear objects has garnered increasing interest within the robotics community. Despite recent progress, the majority of shape control approaches can be classified into two main groups: open-loop…
The inverse kinematics (IK) problem of continuum robots has been investigated in depth in the past decades. Under the constant-curvature bending assumption, closed-form IK solution has been obtained for continuum robots with variable…
This paper presents a sim-to-real approach that enables legged robots to dynamically manipulate large and heavy objects with whole-body dexterity. Our key insight is that by performing test-time steering of a pre-trained whole-body control…
Continuum robots with variable compliance have gained significant attention due to their adaptability in unstructured environments. Among various stiffness modulation techniques, layer jamming (LJ) provides a simple yet effective approach…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
Continuum robots are typically slender and flexible with infinite freedoms in theory, which poses a challenge for their control and application. The shape sensing of continuum robots is vital to realise accuracy control. This letter…