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To increase the awareness and impact, soft robotics needs to go beyond the lab environment and should be readily accessible to those even with no robotic expertise. However, most prevailing manufacturing methodologies require either…
Soft robotic grippers are shown to be high effective for grasping unstructured objects with simple sensing and control strategies. However, they are still limited by their speed, sensing capabilities and actuation mechanism. Hence, their…
Voxel-based structures provide a modular, mechanically flexible periodic lattice which can be used as a soft robot through internal deformations. To engage these structures for robotic tasks, we use a finite element method to characterize…
This paper introduces novel air actuated spherical robot called "RollRoller". The RollRoller robot consists of two essential parts: tubes covered with a shell as a frame and mechanical controlling parts to correspond movements. The…
This study proposes a soft robotic device with a slim and flexible body that switches between air blowing and suction with a single airflow control. Suction is achieved by jet flow entraining surrounding air, and blowing is achieved by…
Electrically-driven soft robots based on piezoelectric actuators may enable compact form factors and maneuverability in complex environments. In most prior work, piezoelectric actuators are used to control a single degree of freedom. In…
To design a general-purpose assembly robot system that can handle objects of various shapes, we propose a soft jig that fits to the shapes of assembly parts. The functionality of the soft jig is based on a jamming gripper developed in the…
With inspiration from arthropods' exoskeletons, we designed a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can passively damp impact energy. This exoskeleton fuses the protective shell to the main robot…
It is essential yet challenging for future home-assistant robots to understand and manipulate diverse 3D objects in daily human environments. Towards building scalable systems that can perform diverse manipulation tasks over various 3D…
In this paper, we introduce Haptic-Informed ACT, an advanced robotic system for pseudo oocyte manipulation, integrating multimodal information and Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT). Traditional automation methods for oocyte transfer…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
The field of bio-inspired soft grippers has emerged as a transformative area of research with profound implications for biomedical applications. This book chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the principles, developments,…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Robotic hands with soft surfaces can perform stable grasping, but the high friction of the soft surfaces makes it difficult to release objects, or to perform operations that require sliding. To solve this issue, we previously developed a…
Shape displays are a class of haptic devices that enable whole-hand haptic exploration of 3D surfaces. However, their scalability is limited by the mechanical complexity and high cost of traditional actuator arrays. In this paper, we…
Bilayer bending based soft actuators are widely utilized in soft robotics for locomotion and object gripping. However, studies on soft actuators based on bilayer doming remain largely unexplored despite the often-observed dome-like shapes…
The engineering design of robotic grippers presents an ample design space for optimization towards robust grasping. In this paper, we adopt the reconfigurable design of the robotic gripper using a novel soft finger structure with…
Robotic grippers with visuotactile sensors have access to rich tactile information for grasping tasks but encounter difficulty in partially encompassing large objects with sufficient grip force. While hierarchical gecko-inspired adhesives…
Inflated-beam soft robots, such as tip-everting vine robots, can control curvature by contracting one beam side via pneumatic actuation. This work develops a general finite element modeling approach to characterize their bending. The model…