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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…
Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…
For soft continuum arms, visual servoing is a popular control strategy that relies on visual feedback to close the control loop. However, robust visual servoing is challenging as it requires reliable feature extraction from the image,…
Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping depth images? The short answer is no: current day robots can't. In this article, we address the problem of shaping plastic material with an anthropomorphic arm/hand robot, which observes the…
Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem that has some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the…
Fast, robust, and flexible part feeding is essential for enabling automation of low volume, high variance assembly tasks. An actuated vision-based solution on a traditional vibratory feeder, referred to here as a vision trap, should in…
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 Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting soft robots' behavior, but its computation time can limit practical applications. In this paper, a learning-based approach based on condensation of the FEM model is…
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…
Modular Active Cell Robots (MACROs) are a design paradigm for modular robotic hardware that uses only two components, namely actuators and passive compliant joints. Under the MACRO approach, a large number of actuators and joints are…
Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…
A robot's mechanical parts routinely wear out from normal functioning and can be lost to injury. For autonomous robots operating in isolated or hostile environments, repair from a human operator is often not possible. Thus, much work has…
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…
Dynamical systems (DSs) provide a framework for high flexibility, robustness, and control reliability and are widely used in motion planning and physical human-robot interaction. The properties of the DS directly determine the robot's…
Recently, several approaches have attempted to combine motion generation and control in one loop to equip robots with reactive behaviors, that cannot be achieved with traditional time-indexed tracking controllers. These approaches however…
This paper presents a soft robot finger capable of adaptive-twist deformation to grasp objects by wrapping them. For a soft hand to grasp and pick-up one object from densely contained multiple objects, a soft finger requires the…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
Embodiment is a significant keyword in recent machine learning fields. This study focused on the passive nature of the body of a biped robot to generate walking and running locomotion using model-based deep reinforcement learning. We…
This paper presents a simple and effective method for setting parameters for an input shaper to suppress the residual vibrations in flexible robot arms using a data-driven approach. The parameters are adaptively tuned in the workspace of…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…