Related papers: Creation of a Modular Soft Robotic Fish Testing Pl…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Many current robot designs prioritize efficiency and one-size-fits-all solutions, oftentimes overlooking personalization, adaptability, and sustainability. To explore alternatives, we conducted two co-design workshops with 23 participants,…
While imitation learning provides us with an efficient toolkit to train robots, learning skills that are robust to environment variations remains a significant challenge. Current approaches address this challenge by relying either on large…
Soft robotic manipulators are attractive for a range of applications such as medical interventions or industrial inspections in confined environments. A myriad of soft robotic manipulators have been proposed in the literature, but their…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
Current experimental design techniques for dynamical systems often only incorporate measurement noise, while dynamical systems also involve process noise. To construct experimental designs we need to quantify their information content. The…
Many robot control scenarios involve assessing system robustness against a task specification. If either the controller or environment are composed of "black-box" components with unknown dynamics, we cannot rely on formal verification to…
Here, we present the concept of an open virtual prototyping framework for maritime systems and operations that enables its users to develop re-usable component or subsystem models, and combine them in full-system simulations for…
Robotic fish have attracted growing attention in recent years owing to their biomimetic design and potential applications in environmental monitoring and biological surveys. Among robotic fish employing the Body-Caudal Fin (BCF) locomotion…
Traditional rigid underwater vehicles pose risks to delicate marine ecosystems due to high-speed propellers and rigid hulls. This paper presents BactoBot, a low-cost, soft underwater robot designed for safe and gentle marine exploration.…
We present a model of a configurable underwater drone, whose parts are optimised for 3D printing processes. We show how - through the use of printable adapters - several thrusters and ballast configurations can be implemented, allowing…
The development of porous polymeric membranes remains a labor-intensive process, often requiring extensive trial and error to identify optimal fabrication parameters. In this study, we present a fully automated platform for membrane…
Soft robot serial chain manipulators with the capability for growth, stiffness control, and discrete joints have the potential to approach the dexterity of traditional robot arms, while improving safety, lowering cost, and providing an…
Soft robots have drawn significant attention recently for their ability to achieve rich shapes when interacting with complex environments. However, their elasticity and flexibility compared to rigid robots also pose significant challenges…
The concept of aerial-aquatic robots has emerged as an innovative solution that can operate both in the air and underwater. Previous research on the design of such robots has been mainly focused on mature technologies such as fixed-wing and…
The schooling behavior of fish is hypothesized to confer many survival benefits, including foraging success, safety from predators, and energy savings through hydrodynamic interactions when swimming in formation. Underwater robot…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
This work introduces the Monolithic Unit (MU), an actuator-lattice-sensor building block for soft robotics. The MU integrates pneumatic actuation, a compliant lattice envelope, and candidate sites for optical waveguide sensing into a single…
The harsh ocean environment and complex operating condition require high dynamic positioning (DP) capability of offshore vessel. The design, development and performance evaluation of DP system are generally carried out by numerical…