Related papers: Lifetime-configurable soft robots via photodegrada…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
Bio-inspired soft robots have already shown the ability to handle uncertainty and adapt to unstructured environments. However, their availability is partially restricted by time-consuming, costly and highly supervised design-fabrication…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
One of the many secrets to the success and prevalence of insects is their versatile, robust, and complex exoskeleton morphology. A fundamental challenge in insect-inspired robotics has been the fabrication of robotic exoskeletons that can…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
The complex behavior of highly deformable mechanical metamaterials can substantially enhance the performance of soft robots.
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…
The fabrication of flexible single-crystalline plasmonic or photonic components in a scalable way is fundamentally important to flexible electronic and photonic devices with high speed, high energy efficiency, and high reliability. However,…
Soft modular robots enable more flexibility and safer interaction with the changing environment than traditional robots. However, it has remained challenging to create deformable connectors that can be integrated into soft machines. In this…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Soft parallel robots with their manipulation safety and low commercial cost show a promising future for delicate operations and safe human-robot interactions. However, promoting the use of electroactive polymers (EAPs) is still challenging…
Deformable robots are notoriously difficult to model or control due to its high-dimensional configuration spaces. Direct trajectory optimization suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality and incurs a high computational cost, while…
The complex physical properties of highly deformable materials such as clothes pose significant challenges fanipulation systems. We present a novel visual feedback dictionary-based method for manipulating defoor autonomous robotic mrmable…
Due to their ability to move without sliding relative to their environment, soft growing robots are attractive for deploying distributed sensor networks in confined spaces. Sensing of the state of such robots would also add to their…
Research on the co-optimization of soft robotic design and control requires rapid means for real-world validation. Existing creation pipelines do not allow for the swift prototyping of soft robots to quickly test various design…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…