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3D printing using robots has garnered significant interest in manufacturing and construction in recent years. A robot's versatility paired with the design freedom of 3D printing offers promising opportunities for how parts and structures…
Pneumatic soft robots are typically fabricated by molding, a manual fabrication process that requires skilled labor. Additive manufacturing has the potential to break this limitation and speed up the fabrication process but struggles with…
Robotic dexterous hands are central to contact-rich manipulation, with rapid progress driven by advances in hardware, sensing, control, simulation, and data generation. However, existing studies are often developed under different…
A dexterous hand capable of grasping any object is essential for the development of general-purpose embodied intelligent robots. However, due to the high degree of freedom in dexterous hands and the vast diversity of objects, generating…
Soft robotic hands promise to provide compliant and safe interaction with objects and environments. However, designing soft hands to be both compliant and functional across diverse use cases remains challenging. Although co-design of…
Robotic surgery and novel surgical instrumentation present great potentials towards safer, more accurate and consistent minimally invasive surgery. However, their adoption is dependent to the access to training facilities and extensive…
Dexterous robotic manipulation in unstructured environments can aid in everyday tasks such as cleaning and caretaking. Anthropomorphic robotic hands are highly dexterous and theoretically well-suited for working in human domains, but their…
Dexterous manipulation has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. While machine learning techniques have shown some promise, results have largely been currently limited to simulation. This can be mostly attributed to the lack of…
Grasping a variety of objects remains a key challenge in the development of versatile robotic systems. The human hand is remarkably dexterous, capable of grasping and manipulating objects with diverse shapes, mechanical properties, and…
Vertebrate animals benefit from a combination of rigidity for structural support and softness for adaptation. Similarly, integrating rigidity and softness can enhance the versatility of soft robotics. However, the challenges associated with…
This paper introduces the BRL/Pisa/IIT (BPI) SoftHand: a single actuator-driven, low-cost, 3D-printed, tendon-driven, underactuated robot hand that can be used to perform a range of grasping tasks. Based on the adaptive synergies of the…
Dexterous robotic hands are appealing for their agility and human-like morphology, yet their high degree of freedom makes learning to manipulate challenging. We introduce an approach for learning dexterous grasping. Our key idea is to embed…
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…
Safe yet stable grasping requires a robotic hand to apply sufficient force on the object to immobilize it while keeping it from getting damaged. Soft robotic hands have been proposed for safe grasping due to their passive compliance, but…
Dexterous manipulation with a multi-finger hand is one of the most challenging problems in robotics. While recent progress in imitation learning has largely improved the sample efficiency compared to Reinforcement Learning, the learned…
Robotic hands are an important tool for replacing humans in handling toxic or radioactive materials. However, these are usually highly expensive, and in many cases, once they are contaminated, they cannot be re-used. Some solutions cope…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Soft robotic grasping has rapidly spread through the academic robotics community in recent years and pushed into industrial applications. At the same time, multimaterial 3D printing has become widely available, enabling the monolithic…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
The ability of robotic grippers to not only grasp but also re-position and re-orient objects in-hand is crucial for achieving versatile, general-purpose manipulation. While recent advances in soft robotic grasping has greatly improved grasp…