Related papers: Soft Fluidic Closed-Loop Controller for Untethered…
Safe operation is essential for deploying robots in human-centered 3D environments. Soft continuum manipulators provide passive safety through mechanical compliance, but still require active control to achieve reliable collision avoidance.…
Wearable and legged robot designers face multiple challenges when choosing actuation. Traditional fully actuated designs using electric motors are multifunctional but oversized and inefficient for bearing conservative loads and for being…
Developing kinesthetic haptic devices with advanced haptic rendering capabilities is challenging due to the limitations on driving mechanisms. In this study, we introduce a novel soft electrohydraulic actuator and develop a kinesthetic…
Robotic locomotion is often approached with the goal of maximizing robustness and reactivity by increasing motion control frequency. We challenge this intuitive notion by demonstrating robust and dynamic locomotion with a learned motion…
Detecting and preventing slip is a major challenge in robotic hand operation, underpinning the robot's ability to perform safe and reliable grasps. Using the robotic hand design from the authors' earlier work, a sensing and control strategy…
This paper underscores the importance of environmental monitoring, and specifically of freshwater ecosystems, which play a critical role in sustaining life and global economy. Despite their importance, insufficient data availability…
Robot swarms hold immense potential for performing complex tasks far beyond the capabilities of individual robots. However, the challenge in unleashing this potential is the robots' limited sensory capabilities, which hinder their ability…
We propose reaching steps towards the real-time strain control of multiphysics, multiscale continuum soft robots. To study this problem fundamentally, we ground ourselves in a model-based control setting enabled by mathematically precise…
Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…
Bio-inspired vehicles are currently leading the way in the quest to produce a vehicle capable of flight and underwater navigation. However, a fully functional vehicle has not yet been realized. We present the first fully functional vehicle…
A new approach for the supercavitating hull optimization was proposed, which combines the CFD simulation and analytical methods. The high-speed penetration into water at the velocity 1 km/s was considered with the fixed body mass and…
Fluidic valves based on the Coand\u{a} effect are increasingly being considered for use in aerodynamic flow control applications. A limiting factor is their variation in switching time, which often precludes their use. The purpose of this…
The current fabrication and assembly of fluidic circuits for soft robots relies heavily on manual processes; as the complexity of fluidic circuits increases, manual assembly becomes increasingly arduous, error-prone, and timeconsuming. We…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
Ionic polymer actuators, in essence, consist of ion exchange polymers sandwiched between layers of electrodes. They have recently gained recognition as promising candidates for soft actuators due to their lightweight nature, noise-free…
Soft robots have drawn great interest due to their ability to take on a rich range of shapes and motions, compared to traditional rigid robots. However, the motions, and underlying statics and dynamics, pose significant challenges to…
Inspired by spiking neural feedback, we propose a spiking controller for efficient locomotion in a soft robotic crawler. Its bistability, akin to neural fast positive feedback, combined with a sensorimotor slow negative feedback loop,…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Compliance is a strong requirement for human-robot interactions. Soft-robots provide an opportunity to cover the lack of compliance in conventional actuation mechanisms, however, the control of them is very challenging given their intrinsic…
We describe a fluidic actuator design that replaces the sealed chamber of a hydraulic cylinder using a soft actuator to provide compliant linear compression with a large force ($\geq$100 N) at a low operation pressure ($\leq$50 kPa) for a…