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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…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Biological agents possess bodies that are mostly of soft tissues. Researchers have resorted to soft bodies to investigate Artificial Life (ALife)-related questions; similarly, a new era of soft-bodied robots has just begun. Nevertheless,…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position…
Mechanically characterizing the human-machine interface is essential to understanding user behavior and optimizing wearable robot performance. This interface has been challenging to sensorize due to manufacturing complexity and non-linear…
Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article…
Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight,…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Soft robotic fingers can safely grasp fragile or variable form objects, but their force capacity is limited, especially with less contact area: precision grasps and when objects are smaller or not spherical. Current research is improving…
In this paper, a reinforced soft robot prototype with a custom-designed actuator-space string encoder are created to investigate dynamic soft robotic trajectory tracking. The soft robot prototype embedded with the proposed adaptive…
The deployment of complex soft robots in multiphysics environments requires advanced simulation frameworks that not only capture interactions between different types of material, but also translate accurately to real-world performance. Soft…
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…
Soft sensors that can discriminate shear and normal force could help provide machines the fine control desirable for safe and effective physical interactions with people. A capacitive sensor is made for this purpose, composed of patterned…
This paper presents the design, control, and applications of a multi-segment soft robotic arm. In order to design a soft arm with large load capacity, several design principles are proposed by analyzing two kinds of buckling issues, under…
Pneumatically operated soft growing robots that extend via tip eversion are well-suited for navigation in confined spaces. Adding the ability to interact with the environment using sensors and tools attached to the robot tip would greatly…
Sensory feedback is essential for the control of soft robotic systems and to enable deployment in a variety of different tasks. Proprioception refers to sensing the robot's own state and is of crucial importance in order to deploy soft…
Contact feedback is essential for contact-rich robotic manipulation, as it allows the robot to detect subtle interaction changes and adjust its actions accordingly. Six-axis force-torque sensors are commonly used to obtain contact feedback,…