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The rapid design and fabrication of soft robotic matter is of growing interest for shape morphing, actuation, and wearable devices. Here, we report a facile fabrication method for creating soft robotic materials with embedded pneumatics…

Interaction with virtual objects displayed in Optical See-through Augmented Reality is still mostly done with controllers or hand gestures. A much more intuitive way of interacting with virtual content is to use physical proxy objects to…

Miniaturised soft pneumatic actuators are crucial for robotic intervention within highly constrained anatomical pathways. This work presents the design and validation of a fibre-reinforced soft actuator at the centimetre scale for inte-…

Soft actuators have shown great advantages in compliance and morphology matched for manipulation of delicate objects and inspection in a confined space. There is an unmet need for a soft actuator that can provide torsional motion to e.g.…

Machines designed for operation in Space, as well as other extreme environments, need to be both resilient and adaptable when mission parameters change. Soft robots offer advantages in adaptability, but most lack resilience to the pressure…

Soft robots have drawn great interest due to their ability to take on a rich range of shapes and motions, compared to traditional rigid robots. However, the motions, and underlying statics and dynamics, pose significant challenges to…

This paper presents UAIbot, a free and open-source web-based robotics simulator designed to address the educational and research challenges conventional simulation platforms generally face. The Python and JavaScript interfaces of UAIbot…

It is prevalent in contemporary AI and robotics to separately postulate a brain modeled by neural networks and employ it to learn intelligent and adaptive behavior. While this method has worked very well for many types of tasks, it isn't…

Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined…

With inspiration from arthropods' exoskeletons, we designed a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can passively damp impact energy. This exoskeleton fuses the protective shell to the main robot…

Soft pneumatic actuators have seen applications in many soft robotic systems, and their pressure-driven nature presents unique challenges and opportunities for controlling their motion. In this work, we present a new concept: designing and…

Humanoid robots are envisioned as general-purpose platforms in human-centered environments, yet their deployment is limited by vulnerability to falls and the risks posed by rigid metal-plastic structures to people and surroundings. We…

As robots increasingly become part of shared human spaces, their movements must transcend basic functionality by incorporating expressive qualities to enhance engagement and communication. This paper introduces a movement-centered design…

Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…

The development of novel texture adaptations for the management of swallowing disorders could be accelerated if reliable in vitro tests were made available. This study addresses some of the limitations of swallowing in vitro models, by…

Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…

Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem that has some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the…

The complex behavior of highly deformable mechanical metamaterials can substantially enhance the performance of soft robots.

To enable general-purpose robots, we will require the robot to operate daily articulated objects as humans do. Current robot manipulation has heavily relied on using a parallel gripper, which restricts the robot to a limited set of objects.…

Soft robotics is an attractive and rapidly emerging field, in which actuation is coupled with the elastic response of the robot's structure to achieve complex deformation patterns. A crucial challenge is the need for multiple control…