English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning Reduced-Order Soft Robot Controller

200 papers

This paper presents a novel approach for robot navigation in environments containing deformable obstacles. By integrating Learning from Demonstration (LfD) with Dynamical Systems (DS), we enable adaptive and efficient navigation in complex…

Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the…

Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…

This paper proposes a simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm for controlling systems with uncertain and varying system parameters. While simulators are useful for safely learning control policies, the reality gap remains a major…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-14 Junya Ikemoto

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…

Rather than traditional position control, impedance control is preferred to ensure the safe operation of industrial robots programmed from demonstrations. However, variable stiffness learning studies have focused on task performance rather…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Masashi Okada , Mayumi Komatsu , Ryo Okumura , Tadahiro Taniguchi

Precise shape control of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) is crucial in robotic applications such as industrial and medical fields. However, existing methods face challenges in handling complex large deformation tasks, especially those…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Zhaowei Liang , Song Wang , Zhao Jin , Shirui Wu , Dan Wu

The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Tønnes Frostad Nygaard , Charles Patrick Martin , Jim Torresen , Kyrre Glette

In this paper, we describe an approach to achieve dynamic legged locomotion on physical robots which combines existing methods for control with reinforcement learning. Specifically, our goal is a control hierarchy in which highest-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Kevin Green , Yesh Godse , Jeremy Dao , Ross L. Hatton , Alan Fern , Jonathan Hurst

To overcome the obstructions imposed by high-dimensional bipedal models, we embed a stable walking motion in an attractive low-dimensional surface of the system's state space. The process begins with trajectory optimization to design an…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2017-11-08 Xingye Da , Jessy Grizzle

Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Takahiro Miki , Joonho Lee , Lorenz Wellhausen , Marco Hutter

Autonomy in robotic surgery is very challenging in unstructured environments, especially when interacting with deformable soft tissues. The main difficulty is to generate model-based control methods that account for deformation dynamics…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Fei Liu , Zihan Li , Yunhai Han , Jingpei Lu , Florian Richter , Michael C. Yip

Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-09-25 Somil Bansal , Roberto Calandra , Ted Xiao , Sergey Levine , Claire J. Tomlin

Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interaction with uncertainty…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuki Shirai , Devesh K. Jha , Arvind Raghunathan , Diego Romeres

Multi-robot navigation and path planning in continuous state and action spaces with uncertain environments remains an open challenge. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is one of the most popular paradigms for solving this task, but its…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Jahid Chowdhury Choton , John Woods , William Hsu

In robotic deformable object manipulation (DOM) applications, constraints arise commonly from environments and task-specific requirements. Enabling DOM with constraints is therefore crucial for its deployment in practice. However, dealing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Jing Huang , Xiangyu Chu , Xin Ma , Kwok Wai Samuel Au

Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-06-28 Yue Chen , Long Wang , Kevin Galloway , Isuru Godage , Nabil Simaan , Eric Barth

Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…

Current end-to-end deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches require jointly learning perception, decision-making and low-level control from very sparse reward signals and high-dimensional inputs, with little capability of incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Vibhavari Dasagi , Robert Lee , Serena Mou , Jake Bruce , Niko Sünderhauf , Jürgen Leitner

The Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) model is the most widely used soft robotic modeling and control. However, the PCC fails to accurately describe the deformation of the soft robots when executing dynamic tasks or interacting with the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Zhanchi Wang , Gaotian Wang , Xiaoping Chen , Nikolaos M. Freris