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Soft robots have struggled to support large forces and moments while also supporting their own weight against gravity. This limits their ability to reach certain configurations necessary for tasks such as inspection and pushing objects up.…
Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials such as foam,…
As aerial robots gain traction in industrial applications, there is growing interest in enhancing their physical interaction capabilities. Pushing tasks performed by aerial manipulators have been successfully demonstrated in contact-based…
Classical rigid-bodied robotic systems are presented with proven success in theoretical development and industrial applications, are recently challenged by the emergence of soft robotics due to a growing need in physical human-robot…
The techniques of precision agriculture include the possibility to execute crop monitoring tasks through the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These platforms are flexible, easy to use and low-cost, and they are the best…
Micro aerial vehicles are making a large impact in applications such as search-and-rescue, package delivery, and recreation. Unfortunately, these diminutive drones are currently constrained to carrying small payloads, in large part because…
Machines that mimic humans have inspired scientists for centuries. Bio-inspired soft robotic hands are a good example of such an endeavor, featuring intrinsic material compliance and continuous motion to deal with uncertainty and adapt to…
This paper describes an investigation of the possible benefits from wing optimisation in improving the performance of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). As an example we study the Avion (3.64 kg mass, 1.60 m span), being designed at the CSIR…
In this paper, we present a generalized, comprehensive nonlinear mathematical model and conceptual design for the MetaMorpher, a metamorphic Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) designed to bridge the gap between vertical takeoff and landing…
Mechanical metamaterials are structures designed to exhibit an exotic response, such as topological soft modes at a surface. Here we explore single-material 3D prints of these topological structures by translating a ball-and-spring model…
As roles for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) continue to diversify, the ability to sense and interact closely with the environment becomes increasingly important. Within this paper we report on the initial flight tests of a novel adaptive…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
This paper introduces the BRL/Pisa/IIT (BPI) SoftHand: a single actuator-driven, low-cost, 3D-printed, tendon-driven, underactuated robot hand that can be used to perform a range of grasping tasks. Based on the adaptive synergies of the…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
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…
This paper develops a flexible and robust robotic system for autonomous drawing on 3D surfaces. The system takes 2D drawing strokes and a 3D target surface (mesh or point clouds) as input. It maps the 2D strokes onto the 3D surface and…
Vertebrate animals benefit from a combination of rigidity for structural support and softness for adaptation. Similarly, integrating rigidity and softness can enhance the versatility of soft robotics. However, the challenges associated with…
This study examines a biology-inspired approach of using reconfigurable articulation to reduce the control requirement for soft robotic arms. We construct a robotic arm by assembling Kresling origami modules that exhibit predictable…