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Multimodal locomotion is crucial for an animal's adaptability in unstructured wild environments. Similarly, in the human gastrointestinal tract, characterized by viscoelastic mucus, complex rugae, and narrow sphincters like the cardia,…
Soft robots utilizing inflatable dielectric membranes can realize intricate functionalities through the application of non-mechanical fields. However, given the current limitations in simulations, including low computational efficiency and…
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…
Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…
We present a cross robot visuomotor learning framework that integrates diffusion policy based control with 3D semantic scene representations from D3Fields to enable category level generalization in manipulation. Its modular design supports…
Soft everting robots present significant advantages over traditional rigid robots, including enhanced dexterity, improved environmental interaction, and safe navigation in unpredictable environments. While soft everting robots have been…
Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep…
The vast majority of existing Distributed Computing literature about mobile robotic swarms considers computability issues: characterizing the set of system hypotheses that enables problem solvability. By contrast, the focus of this work is…
Roboticists have been seeking to address this situation in recent years through the use of soft robots. Unfortunately, identifying appropriate models for the complete analysis and investigation of soft robots for design and control purposes…
Simulating soft robots in cluttered environments remains an open problem due to the challenge of capturing complex dynamics and interactions with the environment. Furthermore, fast simulation is desired for quickly exploring robot behaviors…
As one of the most popular micro-mobility options, e-scooters are spreading in hundreds of big cities and college towns in the US and worldwide. In the meantime, e-scooters are also posing new challenges to traffic safety. In general,…
Soft robots offer adaptability and safe interaction with complex environments. Rapid prototyping kits that allow soft robots to be assembled easily will allow different geometries to be explored quickly to suit different environments or to…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
Accurately modeling friction in robotics remains a core challenge, as robotics simulators like MuJoCo and PyBullet use simplified friction models or heuristics to balance computational efficiency with accuracy, where these simplifications…
We present an innovative robotic device designed to provide controlled motion for studying active matter. Motion is driven by an internal vibrator powered by a small rechargeable battery. The system integrates acoustic and magnetic sensors…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
Soft robots have become increasingly popular for complex manipulation tasks requiring gentle and safe contact. However, their softness makes accurate control challenging, and high-fidelity sensing is a prerequisite to adequate control…
Soft robotics has been a trending topic within the robotics community for almost two decades. However, available tools for the modeling and analysis of soft robots are still limited. This paper introduces a user-friendly MATLAB toolbox,…
Data-driven control methods such as data-enabled predictive control (DeePC) have shown strong potential in efficient control of soft robots without explicit parametric models. However, in object manipulation tasks, unknown external payloads…