Related papers: Unsupervised Sim-to-Real Adaptation of Soft Robot …

The precise control of soft and continuum robots requires knowledge of their shape, which has, in contrast to classical rigid robots, infinite degrees of freedom. To partially reconstruct the shape, proprioceptive techniques use built-in…

Robotic calibration allows for the fusion of data from multiple sensors such as odometers, cameras, etc., by providing appropriate transformational relationships between the corresponding reference frames. For wheeled robots equipped with…

Cross-embodiment learning seeks to build generalist robots that operate across diverse morphologies, but differences in action spaces and kinematics hinder data sharing and policy transfer. This raises a central question: Is there any…

Perception is essential for the active interaction of physical agents with the external environment. The integration of multiple sensory modalities, such as touch and vision, enhances this perceptual process, creating a more comprehensive…

Precise kinematic modeling is critical in calibration and controller design for soft robots, yet remains a challenging issue due to their highly nonlinear and complex behaviors. To tackle the issue, numerous data-driven machine learning…

Task-driven design of soft robots requires models that are physically accurate and computationally efficient, while remaining transferable across actuator designs and task scenarios. However, existing modeling approaches typically face a…

Objective: In this work we address limitations in state-of-the-art ultrasound robots by designing and integrating a novel soft robotic system for ultrasound imaging. It employs the inherent qualities of soft fluidic actuators to establish…

Deep learning models have achieved great success on various vision challenges, but a well-trained model would face drastic performance degradation when applied to unseen data. Since the model is sensitive to domain shift, unsupervised…

Effectively handling the interplay between spatial perception and action generation remains a critical bottleneck in robotic manipulation. Existing methods typically treat spatial perception and action execution as decoupled or strictly…

Mobile service robots are increasingly prevalent in human-centric, real-world domains, operating autonomously in unconstrained indoor environments. In such a context, robotic vision plays a central role in enabling service robots to…

The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…

Recent advances in robotic learning in simulation have shown impressive results in accelerating learning complex manipulation skills. However, the sim-to-real gap, caused by discrepancies between simulation and reality, poses significant…

Optical tactile sensors provide robots with rich force information for robot grasping in unstructured environments. The fast and accurate calibration of three-dimensional contact forces holds significance for new sensors and existing…

Achieving safe quadrupedal locomotion in real-world environments has attracted much attention in recent years. When walking over uneven terrain, achieving reliable estimation and realising safety-critical control based on the obtained…

Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…

We address the challenge of reliable and accurate proprioception in soft robots, specifically those with tight packaging constraints and relying only on internally embedded sensors. While various sensing approaches with single sensors have…

Autoencoders are unsupervised deep learning models used for learning representations. In literature, autoencoders have shown to perform well on a variety of tasks spread across multiple domains, thereby establishing widespread…

Mobile robots operating in unknown urban environments encounter a wide range of complex terrains to which they must adapt their planned trajectory for safe and efficient navigation. Most existing approaches utilize supervised learning to…

It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training,…

Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in soft robotics due to the unpredictability introduced by common manufacturing processes such as 3D printing and molding. These processes often result in deviations from simulated…