Related papers: Soft Multicopter Control using Neural Dynamics Ide…
Controlling soft continuum robotic arms is challenging due to their hyper-redundancy and dexterity. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop control of the configuration space variables of a soft robotic arm, composed…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…
Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…
Deformable robots are notoriously difficult to model or control due to its high-dimensional configuration spaces. Direct trajectory optimization suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality and incurs a high computational cost, while…
Finite element methods have been successfully used to develop physics-based models of soft robots that capture the nonlinear dynamic behavior induced by continuous deformation. These high-fidelity models are therefore ideal for designing…
This paper presents a novel soft robotic system for a deformable mannequin that can be employed to physically realize the 3D geometry of different human bodies. The soft membrane on a mannequin is deformed by inflating several curved…
Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…
In spite of recent progress, soft robotics still suffers from a lack of unified modeling framework. Nowadays, the most adopted model for the design and control of soft robots is the piece-wise constant curvature model, with its consolidated…
While much work has been done recently in the realm of model-based control of soft robots and soft-rigid hybrids, most works examine robots that have an inherently serial structure. While these systems have been prevalent in the literature,…
This paper addresses the challenges of distributed formation control in multiple mobile robots, introducing a novel approach that enhances real-world practicability. We first introduce a distributed estimator using a variable structure and…
The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…
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…
Continuum soft robots are inherently underactuated and subject to intrinsic input constraints, making dynamic control particularly challenging, especially in hybrid rigid-soft robots. While most existing methods focus on quasi-static…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Soft robots are robotic systems made of deformable materials and exhibit unique flexibility that can be exploited for complex environments and tasks. However, their control problem has been considered a challenging subject because they are…
Collaborative robots and space manipulators contain significant joint flexibility. It complicates the control design, compromises the control bandwidth, and limits the tracking accuracy. The imprecise knowledge of the flexible joint…