Related papers: Sim2Real for Soft Robotic Fish via Differentiable …
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
We introduce DIFFTACTILE, a physics-based differentiable tactile simulation system designed to enhance robotic manipulation with dense and physically accurate tactile feedback. In contrast to prior tactile simulators which primarily focus…
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…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
While soft robot manipulators offer compelling advantages over rigid counterparts, including inherent compliance, safe human-robot interaction, and the ability to conform to complex geometries, accurate forward modeling from low-dimensional…
Learning robotic manipulation policies directly in the real world can be expensive and time-consuming. While reinforcement learning (RL) policies trained in simulation present a scalable alternative, effective sim-to-real transfer remains…
Dynamic modeling has been capturing attention for its fundamentality in precise locomotion analyses and control of underwater robots. However, the existing researches have mainly focused on investigating two-dimensional motion of underwater…
Mechanical compliance is a key design parameter for dynamic contact-rich manipulation, affecting task success and safety robustness over contact geometry variation. Design of soft robotic structures, such as compliant fingers, requires…
Magnetically actuated fish-like robots offer promising solutions for underwater exploration due to their miniaturization and agility; however, precise control remains a significant challenge because of nonlinear fluid dynamics, flexible fin…
Fluid interactions permeate daily human activities, with properties like density and viscosity playing pivotal roles in household tasks. While density estimation is straightforward through Archimedes' principle, viscosity poses a more…
Simulation is an important step in robotics for creating control policies and testing various physical parameters. Soft robotics is a field that presents unique physical challenges for simulating its subjects due to the nonlinearity of…
Soft actuators offer a safe, adaptable approach to tasks like gentle grasping and dexterous manipulation. Creating accurate models to control such systems however is challenging due to the complex physics of deformable materials. Accurate…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…
Biological soft tissues exhibit substantial inter-subject variability, making the automation of constitutive material modeling essential for patient-specific analysis and design. Such materials are not only highly nonlinear but also display…
The last few years have witnessed an explosion of new numerical methods for filament hydrodynamics. Aside from their ubiquity in biology, physics, and engineering, filaments present unique challenges from an applied-mathematical point of…
High-fidelity simulation has become essential to the design and control of soft robots, where large geometric deformations and complex contact interactions challenge conventional modeling tools. Recent advances in the field demand…
Commonly used linear and nonlinear constitutive material models in deformation simulation contain many simplifications and only cover a tiny part of possible material behavior. In this work we propose a framework for learning customized…
Manipulation of deformable Linear objects (DLOs), including iron wire, rubber, silk, and nylon rope, is ubiquitous in daily life. These objects exhibit diverse physical properties, such as Young$'$s modulus and bending stiffness.Such…