Related papers: A Dynamics Simulator for Soft Growing Robots
Large-scale robot datasets have facilitated the learning of a wide range of robot manipulation skills, but these datasets remain difficult to collect and scale further, owing to the intractable amount of human time, effort, and cost…
Soft robots can execute tasks with safer interactions. However, control techniques that can effectively exploit the systems' capabilities are still missing. Differential dynamic programming (DDP) has emerged as a promising tool for…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Soft, vine-inspired growing robots that move by eversion are highly mobile in confined environments, but, when faced with gaps in the environment, they may collapse under their own weight while navigating a desired path. In this work, we…
Learning visuomotor policies in simulation is much safer and cheaper than in the real world. However, due to discrepancies between the simulated and real data, simulator-trained policies often fail when transferred to real robots. One…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…
Physical interaction between humans and robots can help robots learn to perform complex tasks. The robot arm gains information by observing how the human kinesthetically guides it throughout the task. While prior works focus on how the…
Exploring the design and control strategies of soft robots through simulation is highly attractive due to its cost-effectiveness. Although many existing models (e.g., finite element analysis) are effective for simulating soft robotic…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting soft robots' behavior, but its computation time can limit practical applications. In this paper, a learning-based approach based on condensation of the FEM model is…
Pneumatic soft robots present many advantages in manipulation tasks. Notably, their inherent compliance makes them safe and reliable in unstructured and fragile environments. However, full-body shape sensing for pneumatic soft robots is…
Autonomous robots have the potential to serve as versatile caregivers that improve quality of life for millions of people worldwide. Yet, conducting research in this area presents numerous challenges, including the risks of physical…
Physics simulation is ubiquitous in robotics. Whether in model-based approaches (e.g., trajectory optimization), or model-free algorithms (e.g., reinforcement learning), physics simulators are a central component of modern control pipelines…
Developing control policies in simulation is often more practical and safer than directly running experiments in the real world. This applies to policies obtained from planning and optimization, and even more so to policies obtained from…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Recent advances in garment simulation have brought high-quality results closer to real-time performance. Physics-based simulators can produce accurate motion, but remain too computationally expensive for interactive applications. In…
Recently, there has been a growing interest in rescue robots due to their vital role in addressing emergency scenarios and providing crucial support in challenging or hazardous situations where human intervention is difficult. However, very…
Traditional dynamic models of continuum robots are in general computationally expensive and not suitable for real-time control. Recent approaches using learning-based methods to approximate the dynamic model of continuum robots for control…
This paper introduces a simulation study of fluid actuated multi-driven closed system as spherical mobile robot called "RollRoller". Robot's mechanism design consists of two essential parts: tubes to lead a core and mechanical controlling…
This paper presents a novel technique that allows for both computationally fast and sufficiently plausible simulation of vehicles with non-deformable tracks. The method is based on an effect we have called Contact Surface Motion. A…