Related papers: Soft Robotic Mannequin: Design and Algorithm for D…
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…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Precise kinematic modeling is critical in calibration and controller design for soft robots, yet remains a challenging issue due to their highly nonlinear and complex behaviors. To tackle the issue, numerous data-driven machine learning…
Understanding how an animal can deform and articulate is essential for a realistic modification of its 3D model. In this paper, we show that such information can be learned from user-clicked 2D images and a template 3D model of the target…
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…
Biomembranes adopt varying morphologies that are vital to cellular functions. Many studies use computational modeling to understand how various mechanochemical factors contribute to membrane shape transformations. Compared to…
Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…
We present an efficient spacetime optimization method to automatically generate animations for a general volumetric, elastically deformable body. Our approach can model the interactions between the body and the environment and automatically…
If robots could reliably manipulate the shape of 3D deformable objects, they could find applications in fields ranging from home care to warehouse fulfillment to surgical assistance. Analytic models of elastic, 3D deformable objects require…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…
Soft robots enable safe, adaptive interaction with complex environments but remain difficult to sense and control due to their highly deformable structures. Architected soft materials such as helicoid lattices offer tunable stiffness and…
Deformable object manipulation presents a unique set of challenges in robotic manipulation by exhibiting high degrees of freedom and severe self-occlusion. State representation for materials that exhibit plastic behavior, like modeling clay…
In this work, an experimental characterization of the configuration space of a soft, pneumatically actuated morphing quadrotor is presented, with a focus on precise thrust characterization of its flexible arms, considering the effect of…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Purpose of Review: This review provides an overview of the state of the art in bioinspired soft robotics with by examining advancements in actuation, functionality, modeling, and control. Recent Findings: Recent research into actuation…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
Dynamic shape-morphing soft materials systems are ubiquitous in living organisms; they are also of rapidly increasing relevance to emerging technologies in soft machines, flexible electronics, and smart medicines. Soft matter equipped with…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…