Related papers: Optimised Design and Performance Comparison of Sof…
Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article…
Soft robotics is attractive for wearable applications that require conformal interactions with the human body. Soft wearable robotic garments hold promise for supplying dynamic compression or massage therapies, such as are applied for…
In this paper, a reinforced soft robot prototype with a custom-designed actuator-space string encoder are created to investigate dynamic soft robotic trajectory tracking. The soft robot prototype embedded with the proposed adaptive…
Safe yet stable grasping requires a robotic hand to apply sufficient force on the object to immobilize it while keeping it from getting damaged. Soft robotic hands have been proposed for safe grasping due to their passive compliance, but…
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…
We consider the optimization of the vector of grasping forces that support a known generalized force acting on the grasped object---a rigid body or a mechanism. Working in the framework of finite-dimensional normed vector spaces and their…
Soft robotics is an emerging field of research where the robot body is composed of compliant and soft materials. It allows the body to bend, twist, and deform to move or to adapt its shape to the environment for grasping, all of which are…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
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…
Machines that mimic humans have inspired scientists for centuries. Bio-inspired soft robotic hands are a good example of such an endeavor, featuring intrinsic material compliance and continuous motion to deal with uncertainty and adapt to…
The paper focuses on the calibration of elastostatic parameters of spatial anthropomorphic robots. It proposes a new strategy for optimal selection of the measurement configurations that essentially increases the efficiency of robot…
This paper introduces a novel six-axis force/torque sensor tailored for compact and lightweight legged robots. Unlike traditional strain gauge-based sensors, the proposed non-contact design employs photocouplers, enhancing resistance to…
Compliance is a strong requirement for human-robot interactions. Soft-robots provide an opportunity to cover the lack of compliance in conventional actuation mechanisms, however, the control of them is very challenging given their intrinsic…
Pushing is a motion primitive useful to handle objects that are too large, too heavy, or too cluttered to be grasped. It is at the core of much of robotic manipulation, in particular when physical interaction is involved. It seems…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel…
Compared to conventional robots, flexible manipulators offer many advantages, such as faster end-effector velocities and less energy consumption. However, their flexible structure can lead to undesired oscillations. Therefore, the applied…
Soft robotic hands promise to provide compliant and safe interaction with objects and environments. However, designing soft hands to be both compliant and functional across diverse use cases remains challenging. Although co-design of…
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…
Practical use of robotic manipulators made from soft materials requires generating and executing complex motions. We present the first approach for generating trajectories of a thermally-actuated soft robotic manipulator. Based on…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interaction with uncertainty…