Related papers: Safe Supervisory Control of Soft Robot Actuators
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Soft robots are promising for manipulation tasks thanks to their compliance, safety, and high degree of freedom. However, the commonly used bidirectional continuum segment design means soft robotic manipulators only function in a limited…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
Soft grippers, with their inherent compliance and adaptability, show advantages for delicate and versatile manipulation tasks in robotics. This paper presents a novel approach to underactuated control of multiple soft actuators, explicitly…
Until recently, the concept of soft robot safety was an informal notion, often attributed solely to the fact that soft robots are less likely to damage their operating environment than rigid robots. As the field moves toward feedback…
Soft actuators have drawn significant attention from researchers with an inherently compliant design to address the safety issues in physical human-robot interactions. However, they are also vulnerable and pose new challenges in the design,…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
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 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…
Controlling soft continuum manipulator arms is difficult due to their infinite degrees of freedom, nonlinear material properties, and large deflections under loading. This paper presents a data-driven approach to identifying soft…
When a human supervisor collaborates with a team of robots, their attention is divided and cognitive resources are at a premium. We aim to optimize the distribution of these resources and the flow of attention. To this end, we propose the…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
Soft robots are powerful tools for manipulating delicate objects, yet their adoption is hindered by two gaps: the lack of integrated tactile sensing and sensor signal distortion caused by actuator deformations. This paper addresses these…
The ignition of flammable liquids and gases in offshore oil and gas environments is a major risk and can cause loss of life, serious injury, and significant damage to infrastructure. Power supplies that are used to provide regulated…
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation…
Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be…
Soft robotics is an attractive and rapidly emerging field, in which actuation is coupled with the elastic response of the robot's structure to achieve complex deformation patterns. A crucial challenge is the need for multiple control…