Related papers: A soft robot that adapts to environments through s…
Navigation functions provide both path and motion planning, which can be used to ensure obstacle avoidance and convergence in the sphere world. When dealing with complex and realistic scenarios, constructing a transformation to the sphere…
Complex motions for robots are frequently generated by switching among a collection of individual movement primitives. We use this approach to formulate robot motion plans as sequences of primitives to be executed one after the other. When…
The challenge of robotic reproduction -- making of new robots by recombining two existing ones -- has been recently cracked and physically evolving robot systems have come within reach. Here we address the next big hurdle: producing an…
Legged robots have demonstrated remarkable agility on rigid, stationary ground, but their locomotion reliability remains limited in non-inertial environments, where the supporting ground moves, tilts, or accelerates. Such conditions arise…
There are various desired capabilities to create aerial forest-traversing robots capable of monitoring both biological and abiotic data. The features range from multi-functionality, robustness, and adaptability. These robots have to weather…
Continuum soft robots, composed of flexible materials, exhibit theoretically infinite degrees of freedom, enabling notable adaptability in unstructured environments. Cosserat Rod Theory has emerged as a prominent framework for modeling…
Due to their ability to move without sliding relative to their environment, soft growing robots are attractive for deploying distributed sensor networks in confined spaces. Sensing of the state of such robots would also add to their…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
This document aims at specifying the requirements and capturing the needs of users for building a softbody simulation system. This system has different applications ranging from computer games to surgery training which facilitates the…
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…
Robots still struggle to dynamically traverse complex 3-D terrain with many large obstacles, an ability required for many critical applications. Body-obstacle interaction is often inevitable and induces perturbation and uncertainty in…
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…
For mobile robots, navigating cluttered or dynamic environments often necessitates non-prehensile manipulation, particularly when faced with objects that are too large, irregular, or fragile to grasp. The unpredictable behavior and varying…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
It is prevalent in contemporary AI and robotics to separately postulate a brain modeled by neural networks and employ it to learn intelligent and adaptive behavior. While this method has worked very well for many types of tasks, it isn't…
Shape change enables new capabilities for robots. One class of robots capable of dramatic shape change is soft growing "vine" robots. These robots usually feature global actuation methods for bending that limit them to simple,…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
There is incremental growth in adopting self-reconfigurable robots in automating manufacturing conventional product lines. Using this class of robots adapting themselves with ever-changing environmental conditions has been acclaimed as a…