Related papers: Using R-functions to Control the Shape of Soft Rob…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Autonomous robots should operate in real-world dynamic environments and collaborate with humans in tight spaces. A key component for allowing robots to leave structured lab and manufacturing settings is their ability to evaluate online and…
In this letter, we investigate the formation control problem of mobile robots moving in the plane where, instead of assuming robots to be simple points, each robot is assumed to have the form of a disk with equal radius. Based on interior…
In this paper, we propose a novel vision-based control algorithm for regulating the whole body shape of extensible multisection soft continuum manipulators. Contrary to existing vision-based control algorithms in the literature that…
Continuum and soft robots can transform diverse sectors, including healthcare, agriculture, marine, and space, thanks to their potential to adaptively interact with unstructured environments. These robots exhibit complex mechanics that pose…
Deformable robots are notoriously difficult to model or control due to its high-dimensional configuration spaces. Direct trajectory optimization suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality and incurs a high computational cost, while…
This paper presents a novel soft robotic system for a deformable mannequin that can be employed to physically realize the 3D geometry of different human bodies. The soft membrane on a mannequin is deformed by inflating several curved…
In this paper, we presented a new method for deformation control of deformable objects, which utilizes both visual and tactile feedback. At present, manipulation of deformable objects is basically formulated by assuming positional…
The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects gains great attention due to its wide applications including medical surgery, home assistance, and automatic food preparation. The ability to deform soft objects remains a great challenge for…
This paper presents a distributed method for robots moving in rigid formations while ensuring probabilistic collision avoidance between the robots. The formation is parametrised through the transformation of a base configuration. The robots…
Controlling the shape of deformable linear objects using robots and constraints provided by environmental fixtures has diverse industrial applications. In order to establish robust contacts with these fixtures, accurate estimation of the…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
In this work, we propose a novel approach to represent robot geometry as distance fields (RDF) that extends the principle of signed distance fields (SDFs) to articulated kinematic chains. Our method employs a combination of Bernstein…
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…
Humans and animals are capable of quickly learning new behaviours to solve new tasks. Yet, we often forget that they also rely on a highly specialized morphology that co-adapted with motor control throughout thousands of years. Although…
Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…
Optimization-based trajectory generation methods are widely used in whole-body planning for robots. However, existing work either oversimplifies the robot's geometry and environment representation, resulting in a conservative trajectory, or…
This paper proposes a unified vision-based manipulation framework using image contours of deformable/rigid objects. Instead of using human-defined cues, the robot automatically learns the features from processed vision data. Our method…