Related papers: Punyo-1: Soft tactile-sensing upper-body robot for…
Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we…
Many-legged elongated robots show promise for reliable mobility on rugged landscapes. However, most studies on these systems focus on planar motion planning without addressing rapid vertical motion. Despite their success on mild rugged…
Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. As the human kinesthetically guides the robot through demonstrations, the robot learns the desired task. While prior works focus on how the robot learns, it is equally important…
Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…
The deployment of complex soft robots in multiphysics environments requires advanced simulation frameworks that not only capture interactions between different types of material, but also translate accurately to real-world performance. Soft…
Human--robot interaction requires robots whose actions are legible, allowing humans to interpret, predict, and feel safe around them. This study investigates the legibility of humanoid robot arm movements in a pointing task, aiming to…
A challenging and important problem for tendon-driven multi-fingered robotic hands is to ensure grasping adaptivity while minimizing the number of actuators needed to provide human-like functionality. Inspired by the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, this…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
In this paper, we introduce the humanoid robot DRACO 3 by providing a high-level description of its design and control. This robot features proximal actuation and mechanical artifacts to provide a high range of hip, knee and ankle motion.…
The human somatosensory system integrates multimodal sensory feedback, including tactile, proprioceptive, and thermal signals, to enable comprehensive perception and effective interaction with the environment. Inspired by the biological…
Adept manipulation of articulated objects is essential for robots to operate successfully in human environments. Such manipulation requires both effectiveness--reliable operation despite uncertain object structures--and efficiency--swift…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
We introduce PuppetAI, a modular soft robot interaction platform. This platform offers a scalable cable-driven actuation system and a customizable, puppet-inspired robot gesture framework, supporting a multitude of interaction gesture robot…
Affective touch offers positive psychological and physiological benefits such as the mitigation of stress and pain. If a robot could realize human-like affective touch, it would open up new application areas, including supporting care work.…
Recently, suction-based robotic systems with microscopic features or active suction components have been proposed to grip rough and irregular surfaces. However, sophisticated fabrication methods or complex control systems are required for…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
Ensuring safe and comfortable bite transfer during robot-assisted feeding is challenging due to the close physical human-robot interaction required. This paper presents a novel approach to modeling physical human-robot interaction in a…
Hugs are complex affective interactions that often include gestures like squeezes. We present six new guidelines for designing interactive hugging robots, which we validate through two studies with our custom robot. To achieve autonomy, we…
Bimanual manipulation with tactile feedback will be key to human-level robot dexterity. However, this topic is less explored than single-arm settings, partly due to the availability of suitable hardware along with the complexity of…
Robotics presents a promising opportunity for enhancing bathing assistance, potentially to alleviate labor shortages and reduce care costs, while offering consistent and gentle care for individuals with physical disabilities. However,…