Related papers: Self-Reconfigurable Soft-Rigid Mobile Agent with V…

Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…

Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…

Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…

Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…

Re-configurable robots have more utility and flexibility for many real-world tasks. Designing a learning agent to operate such robots requires adapting to different configurations. Here, we focus on robotic arms with multiple rigid links…

Multi-robot systems, particularly mobile manipulators, face challenges in control coordination and dynamic stability when working together. To address this issue, this study proposes MobiDock, a modular self-reconfigurable mobile…

Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…

This paper presents an angle-based approach for distributed formation shape stabilization of multi-agent systems in the plane. We develop an angle rigidity theory to study whether a planar framework can be determined by angles between…

Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…

We address the challenge of learning to manipulate deformable objects with unknown dynamics. In non-rigid objects, the dynamics parameters define how they react to interactions -- how they stretch, bend, compress, and move -- and they are…

The deformable and continuum nature of soft robots promises versatility and adaptability. However, control of modular, multi-limbed soft robots for terrestrial locomotion is challenging due to the complex robot structure, actuator mechanics…

Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…

Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…

Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…

Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…

In this paper, a novel hybrid multi-robot motion planner that can be applied under non-communication and local observable conditions is presented. The planner is model-free and can realize the end-to-end mapping of multi-robot state and…

By learning Variable Impedance Control policy, robot assistants can intelligently adapt their manipulation compliance to ensure both safe interaction and proper task completion when operating in human-robot interaction environments. In this…

In this paper, we propose a whole-body planning framework that unifies dynamic locomotion and manipulation tasks by formulating a single multi-contact optimal control problem. We model the hybrid nature of a generic multi-limbed mobile…

The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…

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…