Related papers: Creation of a Modular Soft Robotic Fish Testing Pl…
In this review we introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. In silico, data-driven…
Underwater marine inspections for ship hull or marine debris, etc. are one of the vital measures carried out to ensure the safety of marine structures and underwater species. This work details the design, development and qualification of a…
This paper presents a low-cost, centralized modular underwater robot platform, ModCube, which can be used to study swarm coordination for a wide range of tasks in underwater environments. A ModCube structure consists of multiple ModCube…
As soft robot design matures, researchers have converged to sophisticated design paradigms to enable the development of more suitable platforms. Two such paradigms are soft-rigid hybrid robots, which utilize rigid structural materials in…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
Soft-growing robots (i.e., vine robots) are a promising class of soft robots that allow for navigation and growth in tightly confined environments. However, these robots remain challenging to model and control due to the complex interplay…
Many different robots have been designed and built to work under water. In many cases, researchers have chosen to use bio-inspired platforms. In most cases, the main goal of the fish inspired robots has been set to autonomously swim and…
The vast majority of the ocean's volume remains unexplored, in part because of limitations on the vertical range and measurement duration of existing robotic platforms. In light of the accelerating rate of climate change impacts on the…
Soft robotics has emerged as the standard solution for grasping deformable objects, and has proven invaluable for mobile robotic exploration in extreme environments. However, despite this growth, there are no widely adopted computational…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
The development of novel autonomous underwater gliders has been hindered by limited shape diversity, primarily due to the reliance on traditional design tools that depend heavily on manual trial and error. Building an automated design…
Soft-robot designs are manifold, but only a few are publicly available. Often, these are only briefly described in their publications. This complicates reproduction, and hinders the reproducibility and comparability of research results. If…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
The confluence of soft robotics and fluidic logic have sparked innovations in integrated robots with superior flexibility and potential machine intelligence. However, current fluidically driven soft robots suffer from either a large number…
The effectiveness of the machine learning methods for real-world tasks depends on the proper structure of the modeling pipeline. The proposed approach is aimed to automate the design of composite machine learning pipelines, which is…
The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…
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,…
In this article, a floating robotic emulation platform for a virtual demonstration of satellite motion in space is presented. The robotic platform design is characterized by its friction-less, levitating, yet planar motion over a…
In pipeline inspection, traditional tethered inspection robots are severely constrained by cable length and weight, which greatly limit their travel range and accessibility. To address these issues, this paper proposes a self-propelled…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…