Related papers: A soft robot that adapts to environments through s…
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…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
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…
The functional demands of robotic systems often require completing various tasks or behaviors under the effect of disturbances or uncertain environments. Of increasing interest is the autonomy for dynamic robots, such as multirotors, motor…
Continuum and soft robots can leverage complex actuator shapes to take on useful shapes while actuating only a few of their many degrees of freedom. Continuum robots that also grow increase the range of potential shapes that can be actuated…
The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
Soft robots can exhibit diverse behaviors with simple types of actuation by partially outsourcing control to the morphological and material properties of their soft bodies, which is made possible by the tight coupling between control, body,…
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…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping depth images? The short answer is no: current day robots can't. In this article, we address the problem of shaping plastic material with an anthropomorphic arm/hand robot, which observes the…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Similarly, snake robots hold the promise as a versatile platform to traverse complex environments like earthquake rubble. Unlike snake locomotion on flat surfaces which is inherently stable, when…
Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and healthcare…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
Swarm robotic systems are systems in which multiple robots having simple functionality perform tasks through their cooperation, and are advantageous in that they can exhibit non-trivial macroscopic functions such as adaptability, fault…
Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
Flagellated microorganisms can swim at low Reynolds numbers and adapt to changes in their environment. Specifically, the flagella can switch their shapes or modes through gene expression. In the past decade, efforts have been made to…
This paper presents a soft robot finger capable of adaptive-twist deformation to grasp objects by wrapping them. For a soft hand to grasp and pick-up one object from densely contained multiple objects, a soft finger requires the…