Related papers: Computational synthesis of locomotive soft robots …
Supernumerary robotic limbs (SRLs) offer substantial potential in both the rehabilitation of hemiplegic patients and the enhancement of functional capabilities for healthy individuals. Designing a general-purpose SRL device is inherently…
The work provides an exhaustive comparison of some representative families of topology optimization methods for 3D structural optimization, such as the Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP), the Level-set, the Bidirectional…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Musculoskeletal robots offer intrinsic compliance and flexibility, providing a promising paradigm for versatile locomotion. However, existing research typically relies on models with fixed muscle physiological parameters. This static…
Robust topology optimization (RTO), as a class of topology optimization problems, identifies a design with the best average performance while reducing the response sensitivity to input uncertainties, e.g. load uncertainty. Solving RTO is…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Zero-order optimization has recently received significant attention for designing optimal trajectories and policies for robotic systems. However, most existing methods (e.g., MPPI, CEM, and CMA-ES) are local in nature, as they rely on…
Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space…
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…
We consider path planning for a rigid spatial robot with 6 degrees of freedom (6 DOFs), moving amidst polyhedral obstacles. A correct, complete and practical path planner for such a robot has never been achieved, although this is widely…
The adaptability of soft robots makes them ideal candidates to maneuver through unstructured environments. However, locomotion challenges arise due to complexities in modeling the body mechanics, actuation, and robot-environment dynamics.…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Despite the attention that the problem of path planning for tethered robots has garnered in the past few decades, the approaches proposed to solve it typically rely on a discrete representation of the configuration space and do not exploit…
Depending on multiple parameters, soft robots can exhibit different modes of locomotion that are difficult to model numerically. As a result, improving their performance is complex, especially in small-scale systems characterized by low…
Lattice-like structures can provide a combination of high stiffness with light weight that is useful in many applications, but a resolved finite element mesh of such structures results in a computationally expensive discretization. This…
Soft robots, particularly magnetic soft robots, require specialized simulation tools to accurately model their deformation under external magnetic fields. However, existing platforms often lack dedicated support for magnetic materials,…
We address the problem of adapting robot trajectories to improve safety, comfort, and efficiency in human-robot collaborative tasks. To this end, we propose CoMOTO, a trajectory optimization framework that utilizes stochastic motion…