Related papers: Computational synthesis of locomotive soft robots …
Topology optimization methods have widely been used in various industries, owing to their potential for providing promising design candidates for mechanical devices. However, their applications are usually limited to the objects which do…
Imagine a swarm of terrestrial robots that can explore an environment, and, upon completion of this task, reconfigure into a spherical ball and roll out. This dimensional change alters the dynamics of locomotion and can assist them to…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Topology optimization is a powerful tool utilized in various fields for structural design. However, its application has primarily been restricted to static or passively moving objects, mainly focusing on hard materials with limited…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
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 grasping has rapidly spread through the academic robotics community in recent years and pushed into industrial applications. At the same time, multimaterial 3D printing has become widely available, enabling the monolithic…
Trajectory optimization (TO) is one of the most powerful tools for generating feasible motions for humanoid robots. However, including uncertainties and stochasticity in the TO problem to generate robust motions can easily lead to…
Self-assembly of modular robotic systems enables the construction of complex robotic configurations to adapt to different tasks. This paper presents a framework for SMORES types of modular robots to efficiently self-assemble into tree…
Demands for pneumatic-driven soft robots are constantly rising for various applications. However, they are often designed manually due to the lack of systematic methods. Moreover, design-dependent characteristics of pneumatic actuation pose…
The field of simulation optimization (SO) encompasses various methods developed to optimize complex, expensive-to-sample stochastic systems. Established methods include, but are not limited to, ranking-and-selection for finite alternatives…
The Finite element method (FEM) has long served as the computational backbone for topology optimization (TO). However, for designing structures undergoing large deformations, conventional FEM-based TO often exhibits numerical instabilities…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
The efficient optimization of actuated soft structures, particularly under complex nonlinear forces, remains a critical challenge in advancing robotics. Simulations of nonlinear structures, such as soft-bodied robots modeled using the…
While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…
In the present paper, an integrated paradigm for topology optimization on complex surfaces with arbitrary genus is proposed. The approach is constructed based on the two-dimensional (2D) Moving Morphable Component (MMC) framework, where a…
Soft robots have proven to outperform traditional robots in applications related to propagation in geometrically constrained environments. Designing these robots and their controllers is an intricate task, since their building materials…