Related papers: The Folded Pneumatic Artificial Muscle (foldPAM): …
The functional replication and actuation of complex structures inspired by nature is a longstanding goal for humanity. Creating such complex structures combining soft and rigid features and actuating them with artificial muscles would…
The motivation of our current research is to devise motion planners for legged locomotion that are able to exploit the robot's actuation capabilities. This means, when possible, to minimize joint torques or to propel as much as admissible…
Tendon-driven underactuated hands excel in adaptive grasping but often suffer from kinematic unpredictability and highly non-linear force transmission. This ambiguity limits their ability to perform precise free-motion shaping and deliver…
Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…
In this paper, a compressed air-actuated soft robotic module was developed by incorporating a shape memory alloy (SMA) wire into its structure to achieve the desired bending angle with greater precision. First, a fiber-reinforced bending…
Soft actuators have attracted a great deal of interest in the context of rehabilitative and assistive robots for increasing safety and lowering costs as compared to rigid-body robotic systems. During actuation, soft actuators experience…
Variable stiffness actuator (VSA) designs are manifold. Conventional model-based control of these nonlinear systems is associated with high effort and design-dependent assumptions. In contrast, machine learning offers a promising…
Electrically-driven soft robots based on piezoelectric actuators may enable compact form factors and maneuverability in complex environments. In most prior work, piezoelectric actuators are used to control a single degree of freedom. In…
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…
To simply and effectively realize the trajectory tracking control of a bionic joint actuated by a single pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM), a cascaded control strategy is proposed based on the robust modeling method. Firstly, the…
Conformable robotic systems are attractive for applications in which they can be used to actuate structures with large surface areas, to provide forces through wearable garments, or to realize autonomous robotic systems. We present a new…
Soft pneumatic gripping strategies are often based on pressurized actuation of structures made of soft elastomeric materials, which limits designs in terms of size, weight, achievable forces, and ease of fabrication. On the other hand,…
Foams are versatile by nature and ubiquitous in a wide range of applications, including padding, insulation, and acoustic dampening. Previous work established that foams 3D printed via Viscous Thread Printing (VTP) can in principle combine…
Harnessing complex body dynamics has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Soft body dynamics is a typical example of high complexity in interacting with the environment. An increasing number of studies have reported that these…
Antagonistic artificial muscles can decouple joint torque and stiffness, but contact transients often degrade this independence. We present a unified real-time framework applicable across pneumatic, electrohydraulic, and dielectric…
Pneumatic actuation benefits soft robotics by facilitating compliance, enabling large volume change, and concentrating actuator weight away from the end-effector. However, portability is compromised when pneumatic actuators are tethered to…
The field of robotics is a quickly evolving feat of technology that accepts contributions from various genres of science. Neuroscience, Physiology, Chemistry, Material science, Computer science, and the wide umbrella of mechatronics have…
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,…
Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
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…