Related papers: Distributed Sensor Networks Deployed Using Soft Gr…
We introduce a low-cost method for mounting sensors onto robot links for large-area sensing coverage that does not require the sensor's positions or orientations to be calibrated before use. Using computer aided design (CAD), a robot skin…
Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight,…
Soft robotics have gained increased attention from the robotic community due to their unique features such as compliance and human safety. Impressive amount of soft robotic prototypes have shown their superior performance over their rigid…
Conventional industrial robots often use two-fingered grippers or suction cups to manipulate objects or interact with the world. Because of their simplified design, they are unable to reproduce the dexterity of human hands when manipulating…
As soft robot design matures, researchers have converged to sophisticated design paradigms to enable the development of more suitable platforms. Two such paradigms are soft-rigid hybrid robots, which utilize rigid structural materials in…
Federated weather modeling on sensor data is a distributed system underpinned by federated learning, enabling multiple sensor data sources, including ground weather stations, satellites and IoT devices, to collaboratively train deep…
Soft everting robots present significant advantages over traditional rigid robots, including enhanced dexterity, improved environmental interaction, and safe navigation in unpredictable environments. While soft everting robots have been…
In this paper, a novel tactile sensing mechanism for soft robotic fingers is proposed. Inspired by the proprioception mechanism found in mammals, the proposed approach infers tactile information from a strain sensor attached on the finger's…
Soft robot serial chain manipulators with the capability for growth, stiffness control, and discrete joints have the potential to approach the dexterity of traditional robot arms, while improving safety, lowering cost, and providing an…
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…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Whole body tactile perception via tactile skins offers large benefits for robots in unstructured environments. To fully realize this benefit, tactile systems must support real-time data acquisition over a massive number of tactile sensor…
Flexible sensors are increasingly employed in soft robotics and wearable devices to provide proprioception of freeform deformations.Although supervised learning can train shape predictors from sensor signals, prediction accuracy strongly…
We consider the following problem: a team of robots is deployed in an unknown environment and it has to collaboratively build a map of the area without a reliable infrastructure for communication. The backbone for modern mapping techniques…
In this paper, we revisit the distributed coverage control problem with multiple robots on both metric graphs and in non-convex continuous environments. Traditionally, the solutions provided for this problem converge to a locally optimal…
In this paper, we design an information-based multi-robot source seeking algorithm where a group of mobile sensors localizes and moves close to a single source using only local range-based measurements. In the algorithm, the mobile sensors…
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…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep…