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Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
We present the design of a learning-based compliance controller for assembly operations for industrial robots. We propose a solution within the general setting of learning from demonstration (LfD), where a nominal trajectory is provided…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
The impressive capabilities of humans to robustly perform manipulation relies on compliant interactions, enabled through the structure and materials spatially distributed in our hands. We propose by mimicking this distributed compliance in…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
In topology optimization of compliant mechanisms, the specific placement of boundary conditions strongly affects the resulting material distribution and performance of the design. At the same time, the most effective locations of the loads…
The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid…
Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic…
Long-term Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is crucial for enabling flexible manufacturing systems and integrating companion robots into daily human environments over extended periods. This paper identifies several key challenges for such…
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…
In this paper, we propose a novel safe, passive, and robust control law for mechanical systems. The proposed approach addresses safety from a physical human-robot interaction perspective, where a robot must not only stay inside a…
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,…
Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…
Human dexterity arises from combining high-level task reasoning with finger-level dexterity control and physical compliance at the muscle and skin layers. In robotics, large Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate text-conditioned…
Robots hold great promise for performing repetitive or hazardous tasks, but achieving human-like dexterity, especially in contact-rich and dynamic environments, remains challenging. Rigid robots, which rely on position or velocity control,…
Forthcoming applications concerning humanoid robots may involve physical interaction between the robot and a dynamic environment. In such scenario, classical balancing and walking controllers that neglect the environment dynamics may not be…
Human-robot interactions have been recognized to be a key element of future industrial collaborative robots (co-robots). Unlike traditional robots that work in structured and deterministic environments, co-robots need to operate in highly…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
In this paper, the problem of making a safe compliant contact between a human and an assistive robot is considered. Users with disabilities have a need to utilize their assistive robots for physical human-robot interaction (PHRI) during…
Physical Human-Robot Interaction (pHRI) is critical for implementing Industry 5.0, which focuses on human-centric approaches. However, few studies explore the practical alignment of pHRI to industrial-grade performance. This paper…