Related papers: A Vision-based Sensing Approach for a Spherical So…

Perception is essential for the active interaction of physical agents with the external environment. The integration of multiple sensory modalities, such as touch and vision, enhances this perceptual process, creating a more comprehensive…

Interest in soft continuum arms has increased as their inherent material elasticity enables safe and adaptive interactions with the environment. However to achieve full autonomy in these arms, accurate three-dimensional shape sensing is…

The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…

This paper presents an offset-free model predictive controller for fast and accurate control of a spherical soft robotic arm. In this control scheme, a linear model is combined with an online disturbance estimation technique to…

Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…

Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…

Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. As the human kinesthetically guides the robot through demonstrations, the robot learns the desired task. While prior works focus on how the robot learns, it is equally important…

External collisions to robot actuators typically pose risks to grasping circular objects. This work presents a vision-based sensing module capable of detecting collisions to maintain stable grasping with a soft gripper system. The system…

Camera-based tactile sensors provide robots with a high-performance tactile sensing approach for environment perception and dexterous manipulation. However, achieving comprehensive environmental perception still requires cooperation with…

Tool-based scooping is vital in robot-assisted tasks, enabling interaction with objects of varying sizes, shapes, and material states. Recent studies have shown that flexible, reconfigurable soft robotic end-effectors can adapt their shape…

Wearable assistive devices are increasingly becoming softer. Modelling their interface with human tissue is necessary to capture transmission of dynamic assistance. However, their nonlinear and compliant nature makes both physical modeling…

Training a robotic arm to accomplish real-world tasks has been attracting increasing attention in both academia and industry. This work discusses the role of computer vision algorithms in this field. We focus on low-cost arms on which no…

Legged locomotion benefits from embodied sensing, where perception emerges from the physical interaction between body and environment. We present a soft-surfaced, vision-based tactile foot sensor that endows a bipedal robot with a skin-like…

The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information…

This paper describes the design of a multi-camera optical tactile sensor that provides information about the contact force distribution applied to its soft surface. This information is contained in the motion of spherical particles spread…

We present a tactile sensing method enabled by the mechanical compliance of soft robots; an externally attachable photoreflective module reads surface deformation of silicone skin to estimate contact force without embedding tactile…

Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…

Soft robotics is a modern robotic paradigm for performing dexterous interactions with the surroundings via morphological flexibility. The desire for autonomous operation requires soft robots to be capable of proprioception and makes it…

Robot-to-human object handover is an essential skill for robot assistants, from serving drinks at home to passing surgical tools in the operating room. We expect robots to perform handover robustly -- to release the object only after a firm…

The success of soft robots in displaying emergent behaviors is tightly linked to the compliant interaction with the environment. However, to exploit such phenomena, proprioceptive sensing methods which do not hinder their softness are…