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Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…
This paper presents a novel soft robotic system for a deformable mannequin that can be employed to physically realize the 3D geometry of different human bodies. The soft membrane on a mannequin is deformed by inflating several curved…
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…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
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…
Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Flexible object manipulation of paper and cloth is a major research challenge in robot manipulation. Although there have been efforts to develop hardware that enables specific actions and to realize a single action of paper folding using…
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…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Biological systems, such as the octopus, exhibit masterful cross-scale manipulation by adaptively reconfiguring their entire form, a capability that remains elusive in robotics. Conventional soft grippers, while compliant, are mostly…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…