Related papers: Learning-based Position and Stiffness Feedforward …
Estimating a soft robot's pose and applied forces, also called proprioception, is crucial for safe interaction of the robot with its environment. However, most solutions for soft robot proprioception use dedicated sensors, particularly for…
Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined…
Soft robotics is a swiftly evolving field. Pneumatic actuators are suitable for driving soft robots because of their superior performance. However, their control is challenging due to the hysteresis characteristics. In response to this…
A bio-inspired, passively deployable flap attached to an airfoil by a torsional spring of fixed stiffness can provide significant lift improvements at post-stall angles of attack. In this work, we describe a hybrid active-passive variant to…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…
Controlling soft continuum manipulator arms is difficult due to their infinite degrees of freedom, nonlinear material properties, and large deflections under loading. This paper presents a data-driven approach to identifying soft…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
We design, build, and thoroughly test a new type of actuator dubbed viscoelastic liquid cooled actuator (VLCA) for robotic applications. VLCAs excel in the following five critical axes of performance: energy efficiency, torque density,…
Soft robotics technologies have gained growing interest in recent years, which allows various applications from manufacturing to human-robot interaction. Pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM), a typical soft actuator, has been widely applied to…
With their unique combination of characteristics - an energy density almost 100 times that of human muscle, and a power density of 5.3 kW/kg, similar to a jet engine's output - Nylon artificial muscles stand out as particularly apt for…
This paper presents a novel framework to realize proprioception and closed-loop control for soft manipulators. Deformations with large elongation and large bending can be precisely predicted using geometry-based sensor signals obtained from…
Several recent studies have demonstrated the promise of deep visuomotor policies for robot manipulator control. Despite impressive progress, these systems are known to be vulnerable to physical disturbances, such as accidental or…
As we aim to control complex systems, use of a simulator in model-based reinforcement learning is becoming more common. However, it has been challenging to overcome the Reality Gap, which comes from nonlinear model bias and susceptibility…
Intrinsically motivated artificial agents learn advantageous behavior without externally-provided rewards. Previously, it was shown that maximizing mutual information between agent actuators and future states, known as the empowerment…
The present report summarizes the work conducted during the internship on Feedforward Control of the Magnetic Levitation Setup. Different feedforward strategies, specifically tailored for this setup, are developed and reviewed. These…
We propose a new variational inference algorithm for learning in Gaussian Process State-Space Models (GPSSMs). Our algorithm enables learning of unstable and partially observable systems, where previous algorithms fail. Our main algorithmic…
Robust control of complex engineered and biological systems hinges on the integration of feedforward and feedback mechanisms. This is exemplified in neural motor control, where feedforward muscle co-contraction complements sensory-driven…
Tissue manipulation is a frequently used fundamental subtask of any surgical procedures, and in some cases it may require the involvement of a surgeon's assistant. The complex dynamics of soft tissue as an unstructured environment is one of…
Attention within windows has been widely explored in vision transformers to balance the performance, computation complexity, and memory footprint. However, current models adopt a hand-crafted fixed-size window design, which restricts their…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…