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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…
Clay sculpting is a nuanced, artistic task involving dexterous manipulation with long-horizon planning to achieve high-level goals. As a robotics problem, we formulate clay sculpting as a shape-to-shape matching challenge. Prior deformable…
The human neuromuscular system consisting of skeletal muscles and neural circuits is a complex system that is not yet fully understood. Surface electromyography (EMG) can be used to study muscle behavior from the outside. Computer…
Dynamic motions are a key feature of robotic arms, enabling them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Soft continuum manipulators do not currently consider dynamic parameters when operating in task space. This shortcoming makes…
One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…
A realistic simulation environment is an essential tool in every roboticist's toolkit, with uses ranging from planning and control to training policies with reinforcement learning. Despite the centrality of simulation in modern robotics,…
Current trends in the computer graphics community propose leveraging the massive parallel computational power of GPUs to accelerate physically based simulations. Collision detection and solving is a fundamental part of this process. It is…
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…
Imagine a swarm of terrestrial robots that can explore an environment, and, upon completion of this task, reconfigure into a spherical ball and roll out. This dimensional change alters the dynamics of locomotion and can assist them to…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
The architecture of a robotics software framework tremendously influences the effort and time it takes for end users to test new concepts in a simulation environment and to control real hardware. Many years of activity in the field allowed…
This paper discusses Chrono's Continuous Representation Model (called herein Chrono::CRM), a general-purpose, scalable, and efficient simulation solution for terramechanics problems. Built on Chrono's Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)…
Soft materials play an integral part in many aspects of modern life including autonomy, sustainability, and human health, and their accurate modeling is critical to understand their unique properties and functions. Today's finite element…
We present an elastic simulator for domains defined as evolving implicit functions, which is efficient, robust, and differentiable with respect to both shape and material. This simulator is motivated by applications in 3D reconstruction: it…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for closing the sim-to-real gap in robotics and complex mechanical systems. However, the computational overhead of high-fidelity engines often limits their use in data-intensive tasks like…
This paper presents a generalized framework for the simulation of multiple robots and drones in highly realistic models of natural environments. The proposed simulation architecture uses the Unreal Engine4 for generating both optical and…
This paper establishes a general framework for describing hybrid dynamical systems which is particularly suitable for numerical simulation. In this context, the data structures used to describe the sets and functions which comprise the…
Efficient acquisition of real-world embodied data has been increasingly critical. However, large-scale demonstrations captured by remote operation tend to take extremely high costs and fail to scale up the data size in an efficient manner.…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…