Related papers: Shape Change and Control of Pressure-based Soft Ag…
Our routines play an important role in a wide range of social challenges such as climate change, disease outbreaks and coordinating staff and patients in a hospital. To use agent-based simulations (ABS) to understand the role of routines in…
Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where…
Embodied agents capable of complex physical skills can improve productivity, elevate life quality, and reshape human-machine collaboration. We aim at autonomous training of embodied agents for various tasks involving mainly large foundation…
Fluid-driven elastomeric actuators (FEAs) are among the most popular actuators in the emerging field of soft robotics. Intrinsically compliant, with continuum of motion, large strokes, little friction, and high power-to-weight ratio, they…
An agent's functionality is largely determined by its design, i.e., skeletal structure and joint attributes (e.g., length, size, strength). However, finding the optimal agent design for a given function is extremely challenging since the…
Tissue manipulation is a frequently used fundamental subtask of any surgical procedures, and in some cases it may require the involvement of a surgeon's assistant. The complex dynamics of soft tissue as an unstructured environment is one of…
Modulating the stiffness of soft actuators is crucial for improving the efficiency of interaction with the environment. However, current stiffness modulation mechanisms are hard to achieve high lateral stiffness and a wide range of bending…
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…
Intelligence lies not only in the brain (decision-making processes) but in the body (physical morphology). The morphology of robots can significantly influence how they interact with the physical world, crucial for manipulating objects in…
Non-prehensile planar manipulation, including pushing and press-and-slide, is critical for diverse robotic tasks, but notoriously challenging due to hybrid contact mechanics, under-actuation, and asymmetric friction limits that…
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…
In this review we introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. In silico, data-driven…
In this work we present a framework that is capable of accurately representing soft robotic actuators in a multiphysics environment in real-time. We propose a constraint-based dynamics model of a 1-dimensional pneumatic soft actuator that…
A new fluid-driven soft robot hand in this study uses the idea of the bionics and has the anthropomorphic form, which is oriented to the flexible grasp function. The soft robot hand is composed of a new kind of multi-freedom soft finger and…
We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…
When simulating soft robots, both their morphology and their controllers play important roles in task performance. This paper introduces a new method to co-evolve these two components in the same process. We do that by using the hyperNEAT…
When encountering novel objects, humans are able to infer a wide range of physical properties such as mass, friction and deformability by interacting with them in a goal driven way. This process of active interaction is in the same spirit…
This paper presents a novel methodology to enforce motion safety guarantees even in the event of a sudden loss of control capabilities by any agent within a multi-agent system. This passive safety methodology permits the replacement of…
Fluid-based soft actuators are an attractive option for lightweight and human-safe robots. These actuators, combined with fluid pressure force feedback, are in principle a form of series-elastic actuation (SEA), in which nearly all…
Soft actuators are receiving increasing attention from the engineering community, not only in research but even for industrial applications. Among soft actuators, fibre-reinforced Bending Fluidic Actuators (BFAs) became very popular thanks…