Related papers: Learning Reduced-Order Soft Robot Controller
Dynamic motions are a key feature of robotic arms, enabling them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Soft continuum manipulators do not currently consider dynamic parameters when operating in task space. This shortcoming makes…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Soft robotics have gained increased attention from the robotic community due to their unique features such as compliance and human safety. Impressive amount of soft robotic prototypes have shown their superior performance over their rigid…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a robust motion formation distributed control algorithm for a team of mobile robots. The primary task for the team is to form a geometric shape, which can be freely translated and…
Controlling the deformation of flexible objects is challenging due to their non-linear dynamics and high-dimensional configuration space. This work presents a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) simulator targeted at control…
This paper presents a sample-efficient data-driven method to design model predictive control (MPC) for cable-actuated soft robotics using Bayesian optimization. Instead of modeling the complex dynamics of the soft robots, the proposed…
This work proposes a safety-critical local reactive controller that enables the robot to navigate in unknown and cluttered environments. In particular, the trajectory tracking task is formulated as a constrained polynomial optimization…
A multi-joint enabled robot requires extensive mathematical calculations to determine the end effector's position with respect to the other connective joints involved and their corresponding frames in a specific coordinate system. If a…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…
Pneumatic soft robots present many advantages in manipulation tasks. Notably, their inherent compliance makes them safe and reliable in unstructured and fragile environments. However, full-body shape sensing for pneumatic soft robots is…
Traditional control methods effectively manage robot operations using models like motion equations but face challenges with issues of contact and friction, leading to unstable and imprecise controllers that often require manual tweaking.…
Control system optimization has long been a fundamental challenge in robotics. While recent advancements have led to the development of control algorithms that leverage learning-based approaches, such as SafeOpt, to optimize single feedback…
We present a novel Learning from Demonstration (LfD) method, Deformable Manipulation from Demonstrations (DMfD), to solve deformable manipulation tasks using states or images as inputs, given expert demonstrations. Our method uses…
With the explosive growth of rigid-body simulators, policy learning in simulation has become the de facto standard for most rigid morphologies. In contrast, soft robotic simulation frameworks remain scarce and are seldom adopted by the soft…
Among small-scale mobile robots, multi-modal locomotion can help compensate for limited actuator capabilities. However, supporting multiple locomotion modes or gaits in small terrestrial robots typically requires complex designs with low…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
This paper considers the problem of robot motion planning in a workspace with obstacles for systems with uncertain 2nd-order dynamics. In particular, we combine closed form potential-based feedback controllers with adaptive control…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…