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This paper presents a robust control scheme for flexible link robotic manipulators, which is based on considering the flexible mechanical structure as a system with slow (rigid) and fast (flexible) modes that can be controlled separately.…
In this letter, we investigate the geometrically tailorable elasticity in the twisting behavior of biomimetic scale-covered slender soft substrate. Motivated by our qualitative experiments showing a significant torsional rigidity increase,…
This paper proposes a new variable stiffness soft gripper that enables high-performance grasping tasks in industrial applications. The design of the proposed monolithic soft gripper includes a middle bellow and two side bellows (i.e.,…
Macroscopic friction coefficients observed in experiments are the result of various types of complex multiscale interactions between sliding surfaces. Therefore, there are several ways to modify them depending on the physical phenomena…
Stiffness degradation and progressive failure of composite laminates are complex processes involving evolution and multi-mode interactions among fiber fractures, intra-ply matrix cracks and inter-ply delaminations. This paper presents a…
Shells, i.e., objects made of a thin layer of material following a surface, are among the most common structures in use. They are highly efficient, in terms of material required to maintain strength, but also prone to deformation and…
Human fingers achieve exceptional dexterity and adaptability by combining structures with varying stiffness levels, from soft tissues (low) to tendons and cartilage (medium) to bones (high). This paper explores developing a robotic finger…
Auxetic materials become thicker rather than thinner when stretched, exhibiting an unusual negative Poisson's ratio well suited for designing shape transforming metamaterials. Current auxetic designs, however, are often monostable and…
High strength and high toughness are usually mutually exclusive in engineering materials. Improving the toughness of strong but brittle materials like ceramics thus relies on the introduction of a metallic or polymeric ductile phase to…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
This paper investigates gradient-based adaptive prediction and control for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems under a weak convexity condition on the prediction-based loss. This condition accommodates a broad range of nonlinear models…
A new approach for generating stress-constrained topological designs in continua is presented. The main novelty is in the use of elasto-plastic modeling and in optimizing the design such that it will exhibit a linear-elastic response. This…
This paper presents a computationally efficient robust model predictive control law for discrete linear time invariant systems subject to additive disturbances that may depend on the state and/or input norms. Despite the dependency being…
The stiffness modulation mechanism for soft robotics has gained considerable attention to improve deformability, controllability, and stability. However, for the existing stiffness soft actuator, high lateral stiffness and a wide range of…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority of design decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way of facing this task is computational design methods where design parameters…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
Natural materials often feature a combination of soft and stiff phases, arranged to achieve excellent mechanical properties, such as high strength and toughness. Many natural materials have even independently evolved to have similar…
Active control of wrinkling in soft film-substrate composites using electric fields is a critical challenge in tunable material systems. Here, we investigate the electro-mechanical instability of a soft dielectric film bonded to a…
The paper presents a new stiffness modelling method for multi-chain parallel robotic manipulators with flexible links and compliant actuating joints. In contrast to other works, the method involves a FEA-based link stiffness evaluation and…