Related papers: Reconfigurable, Transformable Soft Pneumatic Actua…
Over the past few decades, efforts have been made towards robust robotic grasping, and therefore dexterous manipulation. The soft gripper has shown their potential in robust grasping due to their inherent properties-low, control complexity,…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
Accurate modelling of object deformations is crucial for a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks, where interacting with soft or deformable objects is essential. Current methods struggle to generalise to unseen forces or adapt to new…
Closed-loop control remains an open challenge in soft robotics. The nonlinear responses of soft actuators under dynamic loading conditions limit the use of analytic models for soft robot control. Traditional methods of controlling soft…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
Soft robotics hold promise in the development of safe yet powered assistive wearable devices for infants. Key to this is the development of closed-loop controllers that can help regulate pneumatic pressure in the device's actuators in an…
We present a highly functional and cost-effective prosthesis for transfemoral amputees that uses series elastic actuators. These actuators allow for accurate force control, low impedance and large dynamic range. The design involves one…
This paper focuses on the design and systematic evaluation of fabric-based, bellow-type soft pneumatic actuators to assist with flexion and extension of the elbow, intended for use in infant wearable devices. Initially, the performance of a…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…
Reconfigurable metamaterials are constructed from tessellation of deformable modules that give rise to a set of tuneable properties. To date, most research focuses on metamaterials that morph between final configurations along a single…
Soft and soft-rigid hybrid robots are inherently underactuated and operate under tight actuator limits, making task-space control with stability guarantees challenging. Common nonlinear strategies for soft robots (e.g., those based on PD…
This paper presents the SoftHand Model-W: a 3D-printed, underactuated, anthropomorphic robot hand based on the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, with an integrated antagonistic tendon mechanism and 2 degree-of-freedom tendon-driven wrist. These four…
Series Elastic Actuators provide many benefits in force control of robots in unconstrained environments. These benefits include high force fidelity, extremely low impedance, low friction, and good force control bandwidth. Series Elastic…
Automating contact-rich manipulation of viscoelastic objects with rigid robots faces challenges including dynamic parameter mismatches, unstable contact oscillations, and spatiotemporal force-deformation coupling. In our prior work, a…
The control and task automation of robotic surgical system is very challenging, especially in soft tissue manipulation, due to the unpredictable deformations. Thus, an accurate simulator of soft tissues with the ability of interacting with…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
Soft robots can execute tasks with safer interactions. However, control techniques that can effectively exploit the systems' capabilities are still missing. Differential dynamic programming (DDP) has emerged as a promising tool for…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Handed Shearing Auxetics (HSA) are a promising structure for making electrically driven robots with distributed compliance that convert a motors rotation and torque into extension and force. We overcame past limitations on the range of…
Soft optical tactile sensors enable robots to manipulate deformable objects by capturing important features such as high-resolution contact geometry and estimations of object compliance. This work presents a variable stiffness soft tactile…