Related papers: Soft Fluidic Closed-Loop Controller for Untethered…
Soft robotics is attractive for wearable applications that require conformal interactions with the human body. Soft wearable robotic garments hold promise for supplying dynamic compression or massage therapies, such as are applied for…
Traditional rigid underwater vehicles pose risks to delicate marine ecosystems due to high-speed propellers and rigid hulls. This paper presents BactoBot, a low-cost, soft underwater robot designed for safe and gentle marine exploration.…
Designing a floating offshore wind turbine (FOWT) controller requires solving engineering challenges not found for fixed-bottom turbines. This paper applies several methods from the growing body of FOWT control literature to the 10-MW…
Rapid acceleration and burst maneuvers in underwater robots depend less on maintaining precise resonance and more on force--velocity phase alignment during thrust generation. In this work, we investigate constrained-layer damping (CLD) as a…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
This paper presents design, fabrication and control of a compliant 2D manipulator, a so called soft actuator. Our focus is on fiber-reinforced elastomer actuators driven by a constant pressure hydraulic supply and modulated on/off valves.…
Machines designed for operation in Space, as well as other extreme environments, need to be both resilient and adaptable when mission parameters change. Soft robots offer advantages in adaptability, but most lack resilience to the pressure…
In narrow, unstructured underwater environments such as environmental monitoring and minimally invasive medical procedures, micro soft robots exhibit unique advantages due to their flexible movement capabilities and small size. At the same…
This paper presents a design methodology of a hydraulically-driven soft robotic gripper for grasping a large and heavy object -- approximately 10 - 20 kg with 20 - 30 cm diameter. Most existing soft grippers are pneumatically actuated with…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
The ocean vast unexplored regions and diverse soft-bodied marine organisms have spurred interest in bio-inspired underwater soft robotics. Recent advances have enabled new capabilities in underwater movement, sensing, and interaction.…
In this study, a small, inexpensive remotely driven underwater vehicle that can navigate in shallow water for the purpose of monitoring water quality and demonstrating vehicle control algorithms is presented. The vehicle is operated by an…
Soft robotic grippers are shown to be high effective for grasping unstructured objects with simple sensing and control strategies. However, they are still limited by their speed, sensing capabilities and actuation mechanism. Hence, their…
Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals across different species to share the same narrow design space for optimal high-efficient and energy-saving locomotion, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate…
We introduce a new low-power 13-mg microactuator driven by shape-memory alloy (SMA) wires for underwater operation. The development of this device was motivated by the recent creation of microswimmers such as the FRISHBot, WaterStrider,…
Autonomous ocean-exploring vehicles have begun to take advantage of onboard sensor measurements of water properties such as salinity and temperature to locate oceanic features in real time. Such targeted sampling strategies enable more…
Integrating Brain-Machine Interfaces into non-clinical applications like robot motion control remains difficult - despite remarkable advancements in clinical settings. Specifically, EEG-based motor imagery systems are still error-prone,…
Swimming microrobots are increasingly developed with complex materials and dynamic shapes and are expected to operate in complex environments in which the system dynamics are difficult to model and positional control of the microrobot is…
Existing fluidic soft logic gates for the control of soft robots either rely on extensive manual fabrication processes or expensive printing techniques. In our work, we explore Fused Deposition Modeling for creating fully 3D printed fluidic…
Soft robots are capable of inherently safer interactions with their environment than rigid robots since they can mechanically deform in response to unanticipated stimuli. However, their complex mechanics can make planning and control…