Related papers: Expanding the Design Space for Electrically-Driven…
Shape displays are a class of haptic devices that enable whole-hand haptic exploration of 3D surfaces. However, their scalability is limited by the mechanical complexity and high cost of traditional actuator arrays. In this paper, we…
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…
Soft robots exhibit inherent compliance and safety, which makes them particularly suitable for applications requiring direct physical interaction with humans, such as surgical procedures. However, their nonlinear and hysteretic behavior,…
Without finger function, people with C5-7 spinal cord injury (SCI) regularly utilize wrist extension to passively close the fingers and thumb together for grasping. Wearable assistive grasping devices often focus on this familiar…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
Tendon-driven hand orthoses have advantages over exoskeletons with respect to wearability and safety because of their low-profile design and ability to fit a range of patients without requiring custom joint alignment. However, no existing…
Robot arms with lighter weight can reduce unnecessary energy consumption which is desirable in robotic industry. However, lightweight arms undergo undesirable elastic deformation. In this paper, the planar motion of a lightweight flexible…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…
Autonomous robots are projected to significantly augment the manual workforce, especially in repetitive and hazardous tasks. For a successful deployment of such robots in human environments, it is crucial to guarantee human safety.…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
Biological agents possess bodies that are mostly of soft tissues. Researchers have resorted to soft bodies to investigate Artificial Life (ALife)-related questions; similarly, a new era of soft-bodied robots has just begun. Nevertheless,…
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…
There is a surge of research interest in the field of tensegrity robotics. Robots developed under this paradigm provide many advantages and have distinguishing features in terms of structural compliance, dexterity, safety, and weight…
Sinusoidal undulation has long been considered the most successful swimming pattern for fish and bionic aquatic robots [1]. However, a swimming pattern generated by the hair clip mechanism (HCM, part iii, Figure 1A) [2]~[5] may challenge…
We present an approach to overcoming challenges in dynamical dexterity for robots through tunable origami structures. Our work leverages a one-parameter family of flat sheet crease patterns that folds into origami bellows, whose axial…
This paper investigates the influence of the internal geometrical structure of soft pneu-nets on the dynamic response and hysteresis of the actuators. The research findings indicate that by strategically manipulating the stress distribution…
We explore how high-speed robot arm motions can dynamically manipulate cables to vault over obstacles, knock objects from pedestals, and weave between obstacles. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning framework that enables a…
Scaling dexterous robot learning is constrained by the difficulty of collecting high-quality demonstrations across diverse operators. Existing wearable interfaces often trade comfort and cross-user adaptability for kinematic fidelity, while…
Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…