Related papers: Proprioceptive Sensing of Soft Tentacles with Mode…

Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight,…

This paper presents a bio-inspired underwater whisker sensor for robust hydrodynamic disturbance detection and efficient signal analysis based on Physical Reservoir Computing (PRC). The design uses a tapered nylon spring with embedded…

Differentiable simulation has become a powerful tool for system identification. While prior work has focused on identifying robot properties using robot-specific data or object properties using object-specific data, our approach calibrates…

Proprioceptive-only state estimation is attractive for legged robots since it is computationally cheaper and is unaffected by perceptually degraded conditions. The history of joint-level measurements contains rich information that can be…

Robotic systems show significant promise for water environmental sensing applications such as water quality monitoring, pollution mapping and biodiversity data collection. Conventional deployment methods often disrupt fragile ecosystems,…

In this letter, an advanced stretchable optical waveguide sensor is implemented into a multidirectional PneuNet soft actuator to enhance dynamic state estimation through a NARX neural network. The stretchable waveguide featuring a…

Due to the complexity of modeling the elastic properties of materials, the use of machine learning algorithms is continuously increasing for tactile sensing applications. Recent advances in deep neural networks applied to computer vision…

Humans perceive the world by interacting with objects, which often happens in a dynamic way. For example, a human would shake a bottle to guess its content. However, it remains a challenge for robots to understand many dynamic signals…

The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…

Autonomous robots must navigate reliably in unknown environments even under compromised exteroceptive perception, or perception failures. Such failures often occur when harsh environments lead to degraded sensing, or when the perception…

This work presents an innovative method for point set self-embedding, that encodes the structural information of a dense point set into its sparser version in a visual but imperceptible form. The self-embedded point set can function as the…

Snapping beams enable rapid geometric transitions through nonlinear instability, offering an efficient means of generating motion in soft robotic systems. In this study, a tendon-driven mechanism consisting of spiral-based metabeams was…

Autonomy in robotic surgery is very challenging in unstructured environments, especially when interacting with deformable soft tissues. The main difficulty is to generate model-based control methods that account for deformation dynamics…

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) provides a useful tool for robotic perception, but its predictions are often uncertain and inaccurate in challenging environments such as surgical scenes where textureless surfaces, specular reflections, and…

The efficient optimization of actuated soft structures, particularly under complex nonlinear forces, remains a critical challenge in advancing robotics. Simulations of nonlinear structures, such as soft-bodied robots modeled using the…

Tactile sensing is critical in advanced interactive systems by emulating the human sense of touch to detect stimuli. Vision-based tactile sensors are promising for providing multimodal capabilities and high robustness, yet existing…

Underactuated soft robot hands offer inherent safety and adaptability advantages over rigid systems, but developing dexterous manipulation skills remains challenging. While imitation learning shows promise for complex manipulation tasks,…

Low surface brightness substructures around galaxies, known as tidal features, are a valuable tool in the detection of past or ongoing galaxy mergers. Their properties can answer questions about the progenitor galaxies involved in the…

Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…

Underwater image enhancement, as a pre-processing step to improve the accuracy of the following object detection task, has drawn considerable attention in the field of underwater navigation and ocean exploration. However, most of the…