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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…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
This paper presents the application of a learning control approach for the realization of a fast and reliable pick-and-place application with a spherical soft robotic arm. The arm is characterized by a lightweight design and exhibits…
Controller design for soft robots is challenging due to nonlinear deformation and high degrees of freedom of flexible material. The data-driven approach is a promising solution to the controller design problem for soft robots. However, the…
Soft robotics is applicable to a variety of domains due to the adaptability offered by the soft and compliant materials. To develop future intelligent soft robots, soft sensors that can capture deformation with nearly infinite…
In this paper, a novel tactile sensing mechanism for soft robotic fingers is proposed. Inspired by the proprioception mechanism found in mammals, the proposed approach infers tactile information from a strain sensor attached on the finger's…
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…
Robots usually establish contacts at rigid surfaces with near-zero relative velocities. Otherwise, impact-induced energy propagates in the robot's linkage and may cause irreversible damage to the hardware. Moreover, abrupt changes in…
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…
Recently several hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for application on torque controlled robots. They have important theoretical benefits but have never been implemented on a…
Object properties perceived through the tactile sense, such as weight, friction, and slip, greatly influence motor control during manipulation tasks. However, the provision of tactile information during robotic training in…
This article presents a novel SOFA based finite element method for the soft body modeling and the corresponding dynamic simulation and control of a pneumatic morphing soft quadrotor. The proposed modeling preserves the physical…
Soft robotics is attractive for wearable applications that require conformal interactions with the human body. Soft wearable robotic garments hold promise for supplying dynamic compression or massage therapies, such as are applied for…
Research on tactile sensing has been progressing at constant pace. In robotics, tactile sensing is typically studied in the context of object grasping and manipulation. In this domain, the development of robust, multi-modal, tactile sensors…
Soft pneumatic robot manipulators are popular in industrial and human-interactive applications due to their compliance and flexibility. However, deploying them in real-world scenarios requires advanced sensing for tactile feedback and…
Soft robot arms have made significant progress towards completing human-scale tasks, but designing arms for tasks with specific load and workspace requirements remains difficult. A key challenge is the lack of model-based design tools,…
The objective of this paper is to present a systematic review of existing sensor-based control methodologies for applications that involve direct interaction between humans and robots, in the form of either physical collaboration or safe…
The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
It is well-known that inverse dynamics models can improve tracking performance in robot control. These models need to precisely capture the robot dynamics, which consist of well-understood components, e.g., rigid body dynamics, and effects…
Snapping instabilities in soft structures offer a powerful pathway to achieve rapid and energy-efficient actuation. In this study, an eccentric dome-shaped snapping actuator is developed to generate controllable asymmetric motion through…