Related papers: Control of a Soft Robotic Arm Using a Piecewise Un…
We present an interactive, computational design system for creating custom robotic arms given high-level task descriptions and environmental constraints. Various task requirements can be encoded as desired motion trajectories for the robot…
Recent trends in robot arm control have seen a shift towards end-to-end solutions, using deep reinforcement learning to learn a controller directly from raw sensor data, rather than relying on a hand-crafted, modular pipeline. However, the…
This paper presents, for the first time, the soft planar vertical take-off and landing (Soft-PVTOL) aircraft. This concept captures the soft aerial vehicle's fundamental dynamics with a minimum number of states and inputs but retains the…
We present the design and implementation of a taskable reactive mobile manipulation system. In contrary to related work, we treat the arm and base degrees of freedom as a holistic structure which greatly improves the speed and fluidity of…
Robotic arms are highly common in various automation processes such as manufacturing lines. However, these highly capable robots are usually degraded to simple repetitive tasks such as pick-and-place. On the other hand, designing an optimal…
Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…
Soft robots, compared to regular rigid robots, as their multiple segments with soft materials bring flexibility and compliance, have the advantages of safe interaction and dexterous operation in the environment. However, due to its…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Most robotic hands and grippers rely on actuators with large gearboxes and force sensors for controlling gripping force. However, this might not be ideal for tasks that require the robot to interact with an unstructured and unknown…
For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not…
Reconfigurable robot swarms are capable of connecting with each other to form complex structures. Current mechanical or magnetic connection mechanisms can be complicated to manufacture, consume high power, have a limited load-bearing…
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…
Soft grippers, with their inherent compliance and adaptability, show advantages for delicate and versatile manipulation tasks in robotics. This paper presents a novel approach to underactuated control of multiple soft actuators, explicitly…
In this paper, we investigate the adaptive control problem for robot manipulators with both the uncertain kinematics and dynamics. We propose two adaptive control schemes to realize the objective of task-space trajectory tracking…
The Underactuated Lightweight Tensegrity Robotic Assistive Spine (ULTRA Spine) project is an ongoing effort to develop a flexible, actuated backbone for quadruped robots. In this work, model-predictive control is used to track a trajectory…
This paper proposes a common interface for real-time low-level motion planning of collaborative robotic arms, aimed at enabling broader applicability and improved portability across heterogeneous hardware platforms. In previous work, we…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
A hyper-redundant robotic arm is a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, capable of executing tasks in cluttered environments where robotic arms with fewer degrees of freedom are unable to operate. This paper introduces a new method for…