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The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
For millions of adults with mobility limitations, eating meals is a daily challenge. A variety of robotic systems have been developed to address this societal need. Unfortunately, end-user adoption of robot-assisted feeding is limited, in…
Assistive robot arms have the potential to help disabled or elderly adults eat everyday meals without relying on a caregiver. To provide meaningful assistance, these robots must reach for food items, pick them up, and then carry them to the…
Grasping objects across vastly different sizes and physical states-including both solids and liquids-with a single robotic gripper remains a fundamental challenge in soft robotics. We present the Everything-Grasping (EG) Gripper, a soft…
Novel robotic grippers have captured increasing interests recently because of their abilities to adapt to varieties of circumstances and their powerful functionalities. Differing from traditional gripper with mechanical components-made…
Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an…
Recent years have seen soft robotic grippers gain increasing attention due to their ability to robustly grasp soft and fragile objects. However, a commonly available standardised evaluation protocol has not yet been developed to assess the…
We introduce the soft curvature and spectroscopy (SCANS) system: a versatile, electronics-free, fluidically actuated soft manipulator capable of assessing the spectral properties of objects either in hand or through pre-touch caging. This…
Task-oriented grasping of unfamiliar objects is a necessary skill for robots in dynamic in-home environments. Inspired by the human capability to grasp such objects through intuition about their shape and structure, we present a novel…
Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…
Quadruped mammals coordinate spinal bending and axial compression to enhance locomotion agility and efficiency. However, existing robotic spines typically lack the active compliance required to support such dynamic behaviours. We present…
Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…
While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…
Inspired by the dynamic coupling of moto-neurons and physical elasticity in animals, this work explores the possibility of generating locomotion gaits by utilizing physical oscillations in a soft snake by means of a low-level spiking neural…
This research proposes a novel morphing structure with shells inspired by the movement of pillbugs. Instead of the pillbug body, a loopcoupled mechanism based on slider-crank mechanisms is utilized to achieve the rolling up and spreading…
Anthropomimetic robots are robots that sense, behave, interact and feel like humans. By this definition, anthropomimetic robots require human-like physical hardware and actuation, but also brain-like control and sensing. The most…
Robotic manipulation policies often struggle to generalize to novel objects, limiting their real-world utility. In contrast, cognitive science suggests that children develop generalizable dexterous manipulation skills by mastering a small…
The elephant trunk exemplifies a natural gripper where structure, actuation, and sensing are seamlessly integrated. Inspired by the distal morphology of the African elephant trunk, we present MELEGROS, a Monolithic ELEphant-inspired GRipper…
Flexible octopus arms exhibit an exceptional ability to coordinate large numbers of degrees of freedom and perform complex manipulation tasks. As a consequence, these systems continue to attract the attention of biologists and roboticists…
This paper develops a mechanical tool as well as its manipulation policies for 2-finger parallel robotic grippers. It primarily focuses on a mechanism that converts the gripping motion of 2-finger parallel grippers into a continuous…