Related papers: Energy-efficient tunable-stiffness soft robots usi…
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…
The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…
The use of soft robotics for real-world underwater applications is limited, even more than in terrestrial applications, by the ability to accurately measure and control the deformation of the soft materials in real time without the need for…
Soft robots have immense potential given their inherent safety and adaptability, but challenges in soft actuator forces and design constraints have limited scaling up soft robots to larger sizes. Electrothermal shape memory alloy (SMA)…
Fluid-based soft actuators are an attractive option for lightweight and human-safe robots. These actuators, combined with fluid pressure force feedback, are in principle a form of series-elastic actuation (SEA), in which nearly all…
The robotic fish with high propulsion efficiency and good maneuverability achieves underwater fishlike propulsion by commonly adopting the motor to drive the fishtail, causing the significant fluctuations of the motor power due to the…
Rapid acceleration and burst maneuvers in underwater robots depend less on maintaining precise resonance and more on force--velocity phase alignment during thrust generation. In this work, we investigate constrained-layer damping (CLD) as a…
This paper presents the first steps toward a soft dolphin robot using a bio-inspired approach to mimic dolphin flexibility. The current dolphin robot uses a minimalist approach, with only two actuated cable-driven degrees of freedom…
Reinforcement-learned locomotion enables legged robots to perform highly dynamic motions but often accompanies time-consuming manual tuning of joint stiffness. This paper introduces a novel control paradigm that integrates variable…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
In this work we developed a mathematical model and a simulation platform for a fish-inspired robotic template, namely Magnetic, Modular, Undulatory Robotics ($\mu$Bots). Through this platform, we systematically explored the effects of…
In the quest for electrically-driven soft actuators, the focus has shifted away from liquid-gas phase transition, commonly associated with reduced strain rates and actuation delays, in favour of electrostatic and other electrothermal…
The move to high performance applications greatly increases the demand to produce large instantaneous fluid forces for high-speed maneuvering and improved power efficiency for sustained propulsion. Animals achieve remarkable feats of…
The success of soft robots in displaying emergent behaviors is tightly linked to the compliant interaction with the environment. However, to exploit such phenomena, proprioceptive sensing methods which do not hinder their softness are…
Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
Efficient mobility and power consumption are critical for autonomous water surface robots in long-term water environmental monitoring. This study develops and evaluates a transformable mobility mechanism for a water surface robot with two…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Soft-growing robots (i.e., vine robots) are a promising class of soft robots that allow for navigation and growth in tightly confined environments. However, these robots remain challenging to model and control due to the complex interplay…
With the rapid development of aerospace technology, the vibration problem of the spacecraft flexible structure urgently needs to be solved. Magnetic fluids are a type of multi-functional smart materials, which can be employed in shock…