Related papers: Computational synthesis of locomotive soft robots …
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…
In complex terrain construction environments, there are high demands for robots to achieve both high payload capacity and mobility flexibility. As the key load-bearing component, the optimization of robotic leg structures is of particular…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
This paper presents a topology-inspired morphological descriptor for soft continuum robots by combining a pseudo-rigid-body (PRB) model with Morse theory to achieve a quantitative characterization of robot morphologies. By counting critical…
In this extended abstract, we report on ongoing work towards an approximate multimodal optimization algorithm with asymptotic guarantees. Multimodal optimization is the problem of finding all local optimal solutions (modes) to a path…
Mobile robots require comprehensive scene understanding to operate effectively in diverse environments, enriched with contextual information such as layouts, objects, and their relationships. Although advances like neural radiation fields…
Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) produce motions for soft robots with simple pressure input, however they require to be appropriately designed to fit the target application. Available design methods employ kinematic models and optimization…
Multi-component polymer systems are important for the development of new materials because of their ability to phase-separate or self-assemble into nano-structures. The Single-Chain-in-Mean-Field (SCMF) algorithm in conjunction with a soft,…
Designing soft robots is a complex and iterative process that demands cross-disciplinary expertise in materials science, mechanics, and control, often relying on intuition and extensive experimentation. While foundation models, especially…
Designing metamaterials for extreme mechanical behavior involves the optimal selection of design parameters. However, identifying these optimal parameters through topology optimization (TO) across a large parametric space requires extensive…
Soft robotics has the potential to revolutionize robotic locomotion, in particular, soft robotic swimmers offer a minimally invasive and adaptive solution to explore and preserve our oceans. Unfortunately, current soft robotic swimmers are…
The deformable and continuum nature of soft robots promises versatility and adaptability. However, control of modular, multi-limbed soft robots for terrestrial locomotion is challenging due to the complex robot structure, actuator mechanics…
Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined…
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…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
We develop and apply a novel shape optimization exemplified for a two-blade rotor with respect to the figure of merit ($FM$). This topologically assisted optimization (TAO) contains two steps. First a global evolutionary optimization is…
We present a level-set based topology optimization algorithm for design optimization problems involving an arbitrary number of different materials, where the evolution of a design is solely guided by topological derivatives. Our method can…
Simulation is an important step in robotics for creating control policies and testing various physical parameters. Soft robotics is a field that presents unique physical challenges for simulating its subjects due to the nonlinearity of…
Lattice-type structures can provide a combination of stiffness with light weight that is desirable in a variety of applications. Design optimization of these structures must rely on approximations of the governing physics to render solution…
Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…