Related papers: Intersection-free Robot Manipulation with Soft-Rig…
Magnetic microrobots can be navigated by an external magnetic field to autonomously move within living organisms with complex and unstructured environments. Potential applications include drug delivery, diagnostics, and therapeutic…
Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…
Inchworm crawling allows for both quasistatic and dynamic gaits at a wide range of actuation frequencies. This locomotion mechanism is common in nonskeletal animals and exploited extensively in the bio-inspired field of soft robotics. In…
Inspired by widely used soft fingers on grasping, we propose a method of rigid-soft interactive learning, aiming at reducing the time of data collection. In this paper, we classify the interaction categories into Rigid-Rigid, Rigid-Soft,…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…
We achieved contact-rich flexible object manipulation, which was difficult to control with vision alone. In the unzipping task we chose as a validation task, the gripper grasps the puller, which hides the bag state such as the direction and…
Passivity is necessary for robots to fluidly collaborate and interact with humans physically. Nevertheless, due to the unconstrained nature of passivity-based impedance control laws, the robot is vulnerable to infeasible and unsafe…
We begin this paper by presenting our approach to robot manipulation, which emphasizes the benefits of making contact with the world across the entire manipulator. We assume that low contact forces are benign, and focus on the development…
To enable a mobile manipulator to perform human tasks from a single teaching demonstration is vital to flexible manufacturing. We call our proposed method MMPA (Mobile Manipulator Process Automation with One-shot Teaching). Currently, there…
Optical tweezers (OT) offer unparalleled capabilities for micromanipulation with submicron precision in biomedical applications. However, controlling conventional multi-trap OT to achieve cooperative manipulation of multiple complex-shaped…
The advent of tactile sensors in robotics has sparked many ideas on how robots can leverage direct contact measurements of their environment interactions to improve manipulation tasks. An important line of research in this regard is that of…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
This study presents an innovative approach to optimal gait control for a soft quadruped robot enabled by four Compressible Tendon-driven Soft Actuators (CTSAs). Improving our previous studies of using model-free reinforcement learning for…
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…
Mobile manipulator robots operating in complex domestic and industrial environments must effectively coordinate their base and arm motions while avoiding obstacles. While current reactive control methods gracefully achieve this…
Contact modeling plays a central role in motion planning, simulation, and control of legged robots, as legged locomotion is realized through contact. The two prevailing approaches to model the contact consider rigid and compliant premise at…
In this paper, we present an approach for generating a variety of whole-body motions for a humanoid robot. We extend the available Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches for walking on flat terrain to plan for both vertical motion of the…
Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…