Related papers: Controlling a CyberOctopus Soft Arm with Muscle-li…

The organization of live cells to tissues is associated with the mechanical interaction between cells, which is mediated through their elastic environment. We model cells as spherical active force dipoles surrounded by an infinite elastic…

We present a new approach for modelling musculoskeletal anatomy. Unlike previous methods, we do not model individual muscle shapes as geometric primitives (polygonal meshes, NURBS etc.). Instead, we adopt a volumetric segmentation approach…

Soft continuum robots can allow for biocompatible yet compliant motions, such as the ability of octopus arms to swim, crawl, and manipulate objects. However, current state-of-the-art continuum robots can only achieve real-time task-space…

Human impedance parameters play an integral role in the dynamics of strength amplification exoskeletons. Many methods are used to estimate the stiffness of human muscles, but few are used to improve the performance of strength amplification…

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…

The study of cells' dynamical properties is essential to a better understanding of several physiological processes. These properties are directly associated with cells' mechanical parameters experimentally achieved through physical stress.…

Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…

This paper presents an analytical framework to study the geometry arising when a soft continuum arm grasps a planar object. Both the arm centerline and the object boundary are modeled as smooth curves. The grasping problem is formulated as…

A key challenge towards reliable robotic control is devising computational models that can both learn policies and guarantee robustness when deployed in the field. Inspired by the free energy principle in computational neuroscience, to…

Continuum robotic grasping, inspired by biological appendages such as octopus arms and elephant trunks, provides a versatile and adaptive approach to object manipulation. Unlike conventional rigid-body grasping, continuum robots leverage…

Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting on precisely-targeted cells in biological tissues. Some tasks may benefit from robots that change shape, such as elongating to improve chemical gradient…

A neural network-based framework is developed and experimentally demonstrated for the problem of estimating the shape of a soft continuum arm (SCA) from noisy measurements of the pose at a finite number of locations along the length of the…

This paper presents ASPEN, a novel energy-aware technique for neuromorphic systems that could unleash the future of intelligent, always-on, ultra-low-power, and low-burden wearables. Our main research objectives are to explore the…

This paper presents two novel control methodologies for the cooperative manipulation of an object by N robotic agents. Firstly, we design an adaptive control protocol which employs quaternion feedback for the object orientation to avoid…

This paper presents design and control innovations of wearable robots that tackle two barriers to widespread adoption of powered exoskeletons, namely restriction of human movement and versatile control of wearable co-robot systems. First,…

Cosserat rod theory is the popular approach to modeling ferromagnetic soft robots as 1-Dimensional (1D) slender structures in most applications, such as biomedical. However, recent soft robots designed for locomotion and manipulation often…

Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…

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…

Animal brains exhibit remarkable efficiency in perception and action, while being robust to both external and internal perturbations. The means by which brains accomplish this remains, for now, poorly understood, hindering our understanding…

Manipulating the shape of nanoscale objects in a controllable fashion is at the heart of designing materials that act as building blocks for self-assembly or serve as targeted drug delivery carriers. Inducing shape deformations by…