Related papers: Lifetime-configurable soft robots via photodegrada…
Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…
In this paper, we propose a novel design of a hybrid mobile robot with controllable stiffness and deformable shape. Compared to conventional mobile agents, our system can switch between rigid and compliant phases by solidifying or melting…
Deformable substrates such as sand and mud present significant challenges for terrestrial robots due to complex robot-terrain interactions. Inspired by mudskippers, amphibious animals that naturally adjust their tail morphology and movement…
Freestanding thin films, a class of low-dimensional materials capable of maintaining structural integrity without substrates, have emerged as a forefront research focus. Their unique advantages-circumventing substrate clamping, liberating…
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…
We present a methodology for fast prototyping of morphologies and controllers for robot locomotion. Going beyond simulation-based approaches, we argue that the form and function of a robot, as well as their interplay with real-world…
Soft robots have drawn significant attention recently for their ability to achieve rich shapes when interacting with complex environments. However, their elasticity and flexibility compared to rigid robots also pose significant challenges…
Soft robotic manipulators are generally slow despite their great adaptability, resilience, and compliance. This limitation also extends to current soft robotic micromanipulators. Here, we introduce FilMBot, a 3-DOF film-based,…
Robotic manipulation has made significant advancements, with systems demonstrating high precision and repeatability. However, this remarkable precision often fails to translate into efficient manipulation of thin deformable objects. Current…
Robotic dressing assistance has the potential to improve the quality of life for individuals with limited mobility. Existing solutions predominantly rely on rigid robotic manipulators, which have challenges in handling deformable garments…
Soft robots have garnered significant attention due to their promising applications across various domains. A hallmark of these systems is their bilayer structure, where strain mismatch caused by differential expansion between layers…
Many marine creatures, gastropods, and earthworms generate continuous traveling waves in their bodies for locomotion within marine environments, complex surfaces, and inside narrow gaps. In this work, we study theoretically and…
All-around, real-time navigation and sensing across the water environments by miniature soft robotics are promising, for their merits of small size, high agility and good compliance to the unstructured surroundings. In this paper, we…
The human skin exhibits remarkable capability to perceive contact forces and environmental temperatures, providing intricate information essential for nuanced manipulation. Despite recent advancements in soft tactile sensors, a significant…
Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the…
Soft robots are interesting examples of hyper-redundancy in robotics, however, the nonlinear continuous dynamics of these robots and the use of hyper-elastic and visco-elastic materials makes modeling of these robots more complicated. This…
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…
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…
The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…
Complex and even chaotic dynamics, though prevalent in many natural and engineered systems, has been largely avoided in the design of electromechanical systems due to concerns about wear and controlability. Here, we demonstrate that complex…