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Electrically-driven soft robots based on piezoelectric actuators may enable compact form factors and maneuverability in complex environments. In most prior work, piezoelectric actuators are used to control a single degree of freedom. In…
Electrostatic actuators provide a promising approach to creating soft robotic sheets, due to their flexible form factor, modular integration, and fast response speed. However, their control requires kilo-Volt signals and understanding of…
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…
Soft robots present unique capabilities, but have been limited by the lack of scalable technologies for construction and the complexity of algorithms for efficient control and motion, which depend on soft-body dynamics, high-dimensional…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
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…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, 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…
Simulating soft robots in cluttered environments remains an open problem due to the challenge of capturing complex dynamics and interactions with the environment. Furthermore, fast simulation is desired for quickly exploring robot behaviors…
Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
Continuum and soft robots can leverage complex actuator shapes to take on useful shapes while actuating only a few of their many degrees of freedom. Continuum robots that also grow increase the range of potential shapes that can be actuated…
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…
We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…
Bio-inspired soft robots have already shown the ability to handle uncertainty and adapt to unstructured environments. However, their availability is partially restricted by time-consuming, costly and highly supervised design-fabrication…
The compliance of soft robotic arms renders the development of accurate kinematic & dynamical models especially challenging. The most widely used model in soft robotic kinematics assumes Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC). However, PCC…
Soft robots utilizing inflatable dielectric membranes can realize intricate functionalities through the application of non-mechanical fields. However, given the current limitations in simulations, including low computational efficiency and…
The system design and algorithm development of mobile 3D printing robots need a realistic simulation. They require a mobile robot simulation platform to interoperate with a physics-based material simulation for handling interactions between…
In this paper, we present a novel rolling, jumping robot. The robot consists of a driven pendulum mounted to a wheel in a compact, lightweight, 3D printed design. We show that by driving the pendulum to shift the robot's weight…