Related papers: Cosserat-Rod Based Dynamic Modeling of Soft Slende…
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…
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…
Soft actuators offer compliant and safe interaction with an unstructured environment compared to their rigid counterparts. However, control of these systems is often challenging because they are inherently under-actuated, have infinite…
Continuum robots are flexible, thin manipulators capable of navigating confined or delicate environments making them well suited for surgical applications. Previous approaches to continuum robot state estimation typically rely on…
In this paper, we design feedback control laws for soft robots modelled using the Cosserat rod, which is spatially discretised using the Piecewise Constant Strain (PCS) approach. The PCS approach transforms the nonlinear PDEs describing the…
State estimation is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. For soft continuum robots, this task is particularly challenging because their states (poses, strains, internal wrenches, and velocities) are inherently infinite-dimensional…
In this study, an inhomogeneous Cosserat rod theory is introduced and compared to the conventional homogeneous rod for modeling soft manipulators. The inhomogeneity is addressed by considering the pressure actuation as part of the rod's…
Controlling soft continuum robotic arms is challenging due to their hyper-redundancy and dexterity. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop control of the configuration space variables of a soft robotic arm, composed…
SLOT (Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot with 3D-printed TPU legs, is presented to study physics-informed modeling and control of compliant legged locomotion using only four actuators. Each leg is…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Soft robots are challenging to model due in large part to the nonlinear properties of soft materials. Fortunately, this softness makes it possible to safely observe their behavior under random control inputs, making them amenable to…
This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…
This paper introduces a general Lie group framework for modeling continuum soft robots, employing Cosserat rod theory combined with cumulative parameterization on the Lie group SE(3). This novel approach addresses limitations present in…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
Soft robots were introduced in large part to enable safe, adaptive interaction with the environment, and this interaction relies fundamentally on contact. However, modeling and planning contact-rich interactions for soft robots remain…
We present a hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian method for the direct simulation of three-dimensional, heterogeneous structures made of soft fibers and immersed in incompressible viscous fluids. Fiber-based organization of matter is pervasive in…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
In this paper, the modelling strategy of a Cosserat rod element (CRE) is addressed systematically for 3-dimensional dynamical analysis of slender structures. We employ the exact nonlinear kinematic relationships in the sense of Cosserat…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…