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Soft robotic manipulators are attractive for a range of applications such as medical interventions or industrial inspections in confined environments. A myriad of soft robotic manipulators have been proposed in the literature, but their…
Simulation is a central tool for scalable robot learning, but its effectiveness depends on the quality of object assets. While modern 3D datasets provide rich geometric and kinematic representations, they typically lack the physical…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
The concept of creating all-mechanical soft microrobotic systems has great potential to address outstanding challenges in biomedical applications, and introduce more sustainable and multifunctional products. To this end, magnetic fields and…
Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be…
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation…
This study proposes a soft robotic device with a slim and flexible body that switches between air blowing and suction with a single airflow control. Suction is achieved by jet flow entraining surrounding air, and blowing is achieved by…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
Soft robotic actuators are safe and adaptable devices with inherent compliance, which makes them attractive for manipulating delicate and complex objects. Researchers have integrated stiff materials into soft actuators to increase their…
This paper presents a new method for modelling the dynamic behaviour of developable ribbons, two dimensional strips with much smaller width than length. Instead of approximating such surface with a general triangle mesh, we characterize it…
Soft robots have found extensive applications in the medical field, particularly in rehabilitation exercises, assisted grasping, and artificial organs. Despite significant advancements in simulating various components of the digestive…
The nonlinear mechanical response of soft materials and slender structures is purposefully harnessed to program functions by design in soft robotic actuators, such as sequencing, amplified response, fast energy release, etc. However,…
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…
Traditional character animation specializes in characters with a rigidly articulated skeleton and a bipedal/quadripedal morphology. This assumption simplifies many aspects for designing physically based animations, like locomotion, but…
Soft modular robots enable more flexibility and safer interaction with the changing environment than traditional robots. However, it has remained challenging to create deformable connectors that can be integrated into soft machines. In this…
Soft actuators are receiving increasing attention from the engineering community, not only in research but even for industrial applications. Among soft actuators, fibre-reinforced Bending Fluidic Actuators (BFAs) became very popular thanks…
Distributed Manipulator Systems, composed of arrays of robotic actuators necessitate dense actuator arrays to effectively manipulate small objects. This paper presents a system composed of modular 3-DoF robotic tiles interconnected by a…
Soft robotic hands and grippers are increasingly attracting attention as a robotic end-effector. Compared with rigid counterparts, they are safer for human-robot and environment-robot interactions, easier to control, lower cost and weight,…
In the field of soft robotics, flexibility, adaptability, and functionality define a new era of robotic systems that can safely deform, reach, and grasp. To optimize the design of soft robotic systems, it is critical to understand their…
Mechanical metamaterials are structures designed to exhibit an exotic response, such as topological soft modes at a surface. Here we explore single-material 3D prints of these topological structures by translating a ball-and-spring model…