Related papers: Elastica: A compliant mechanics environment for so…
Learning robot tasks or controllers using deep reinforcement learning has been proven effective in simulations. Learning in simulation has several advantages. For example, one can fully control the simulated environment, including halting…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
This paper presents a novel simulation platform, ZeMa, designed for robotic manipulation tasks concerning soft objects. Such simulation ideally requires three properties: two-way soft-rigid coupling, intersection-free guarantees, and…
In this work, the novel, open-source humanoid robot, PANDORA, is presented where a majority of the structural elements are manufactured using 3D-printed compliant materials. As opposed to contemporary approaches that incorporate the elastic…
Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…
In this paper, we introduce a consistency-driven dual LSTM framework for accurately learning both the forward and inverse kinematics of a pneumatically actuated soft robotic arm integrated into a wearable device. This approach effectively…
High-speed and high-acceleration movements are inherently hard to control. Applying learning to the control of such motions on anthropomorphic robot arms can improve the accuracy of the control but might damage the system. The inherent…
Flexible robots may overcome some of the industry's major challenges, such as enabling intrinsically safe human-robot collaboration and achieving a higher payload-to-mass ratio. However, controlling flexible robots is complicated due to…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
The design and control of soft robots operating in fluid environments requires a careful understanding of the interplay between large elastic body deformations and hydrodynamic forces. Here we show that this interplay leads to novel…
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…
This paper deals with the robust force and position control problems of Series Elastic Actuators. It is shown that a Series Elastic Actuator's force control problem can be described by a second-order dynamic model which suffers from only…
This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…
Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…
Handed Shearing Auxetics (HSA) are a promising structure for making electrically driven robots with distributed compliance that convert a motors rotation and torque into extension and force. We overcame past limitations on the range of…
We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…
Soft robotics is attractive for wearable applications that require conformal interactions with the human body. Soft wearable robotic garments hold promise for supplying dynamic compression or massage therapies, such as are applied for…
Soft robotic fingers can safely grasp fragile or variable form objects, but their force capacity is limited, especially with less contact area: precision grasps and when objects are smaller or not spherical. Current research is improving…
In the context of surgery, robots can provide substantial assistance by performing small, repetitive tasks such as suturing, needle exchange, and tissue retraction, thereby enabling surgeons to concentrate on more complex aspects of the…
Continuum robots have gained widespread popularity due to their inherent compliance and flexibility, particularly their adjustable levels of stiffness for various application scenarios. Despite efforts to dynamic modeling and control…