Related papers: Collision-Aware Fast Simulation for Soft Robots by…
Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and…
A novel algorithm is presented for the estimation of collision probabilities between dynamic objects with uncertain trajectories, where the trajectories are given as a sequence of poses with Gaussian distributions. We propose an adaptive…
Voxel-based soft robots (VSRs) are aggregations of soft blocks whose design is amenable to optimization. We here present a software, 2D-VSR-Sim, for facilitating research concerning the optimization of VSRs body and brain. The software,…
While soft robot manipulators offer compelling advantages over rigid counterparts, including inherent compliance, safe human-robot interaction, and the ability to conform to complex geometries, accurate forward modeling from low-dimensional…
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…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…
This work establishes a solution to the problem of assessing the capacity of multi-object assemblies to withstand external forces without becoming unstable. Our physically-grounded approach handles arbitrary structures made from rigid…
We present a model predictive controller (MPC) that automatically discovers collision-free locomotion while simultaneously taking into account the system dynamics, friction constraints, and kinematic limitations. A relaxed barrier function…
Finite element methods have been successfully used to develop physics-based models of soft robots that capture the nonlinear dynamic behavior induced by continuous deformation. These high-fidelity models are therefore ideal for designing…
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents…
As robots leave the controlled environments of factories to autonomously function in more complex, natural environments, they will have to respond to the inevitable fact that they will become damaged. However, while animals can quickly…
Pneumatic soft robots present many advantages in manipulation tasks. Notably, their inherent compliance makes them safe and reliable in unstructured and fragile environments. However, full-body shape sensing for pneumatic soft robots is…
Differentiable physics simulation provides an avenue to tackle previously intractable challenges through gradient-based optimization, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of solving robotics-related problems. To apply differentiable…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
We present a novel algorithm for collision-free kinematics of multiple manipulators in a shared workspace with moving obstacles. Our optimization-based approach simultaneously handles collision-free constraints based on reciprocal velocity…
This paper contributes a novel and modularized learning-based method for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing hard-to-perceive thin obstacles without assuming access to a map or the full pose estimation of the robot.…
High-fidelity simulation has become essential to the design and control of soft robots, where large geometric deformations and complex contact interactions challenge conventional modeling tools. Recent advances in the field demand…
External collisions to robot actuators typically pose risks to grasping circular objects. This work presents a vision-based sensing module capable of detecting collisions to maintain stable grasping with a soft gripper system. The system…
Legged robots constructed from soft materials are commonly claimed to demonstrate safer, more robust environmental interactions than their rigid counterparts. However, this motivating feature of soft robots requires more rigorous…