Related papers: A Dexterous Tip-extending Robot with Variable-leng…
Despite a significant proportion of the Earth being covered in water, exploration of what lies below has been limited due to the challenges and difficulties inherent in the process. Current state of the art robots such as Remotely Operated…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This paper presents a deformable…
The morphing of 3D structures is suitable for i) future tunable material design for customizing material properties and ii) advanced manufacturing tools for fabricating 3D structures on a 2D plane. However, there is no inverse design method…
The automatic design of embodied agents (e.g. robots) has existed for 31 years and is experiencing a renaissance of interest in the literature. To date however, the field has remained narrowly focused on two kinds of anatomically simple…
Many order fulfillment applications in logistics, such as packing, involve picking objects from unstructured piles before tightly arranging them in bins or shipping containers. Desirable robotic solutions in this space need to be low-cost,…
Caging is a promising tool which allows a robot to manipulate an object without directly reasoning about the contact dynamics involved. Furthermore, caging also provides useful guarantees in terms of robustness to uncertainty, and often…
This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…
This paper presents the technique of flex-and-flip manipulation. It is suitable for grasping thin, flexible linear objects lying on a flat surface. During the manipulation process, the object is first flexed by a robotic gripper whose…
Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control,…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
This paper tackles the task of singulating and grasping paper-like deformable objects. We refer to such tasks as paper-flipping. In contrast to manipulating deformable objects that lack compression strength (such as shirts and ropes), minor…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…
For robots to become more versatile and expand their areas of application, their bodies need to be suitable for contact with the environment. When the human body comes into contact with the environment, it is possible for it to continue to…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…
Soft robotics focuses on designing robots with highly deformable materials, allowing them to adapt and operate safely and reliably in unstructured and variable environments. While soft robots offer increased compliance over rigid body…
Truss robots are highly redundant parallel robotic systems that can be applied in a variety of scenarios. The variable topology truss (VTT) is a class of modular truss robots. As self-reconfigurable modular robots, a VTT is composed of many…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…