Related papers: A Soft Continuum Robot with Self-Controllable Vari…
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 are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
The deployment of complex soft robots in multiphysics environments requires advanced simulation frameworks that not only capture interactions between different types of material, but also translate accurately to real-world performance. Soft…
Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…
A cable-driven soft-bodied robot with redundancy can conduct the trajectory tracking task and in the meanwhile fulfill some extra constraints, such as tracking through an end-effector in designated orientation, or get rid of the evitable…
We propose reaching steps towards the real-time strain control of multiphysics, multiscale continuum soft robots. To study this problem fundamentally, we ground ourselves in a model-based control setting enabled by mathematically precise…
Continuum robots (CRs), owing to their compact structure, inherent compliance, and flexible deformation, have been widely applied in various fields. By coordinating multiple CRs to form collaborative continuum robots (CCRs), task…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
In this paper, we present a novel and generic data-driven method to servo-control the 3-D shape of continuum and soft robots embedded with fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors. Developments of 3-D shape perception and control technologies are…
Active control of the shape of soft robots is challenging. Despite having an infinite number of passive degrees of freedom (DOFs), soft robots typically only have a few actively controllable DOFs, limited by the number of degrees of…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Soft robotics focuses on designing robots with highly deformable materials, allowing them to adapt and operate safely and reliably in unstructured and variable environments. While soft robots offer increased compliance over rigid body…
There is a growing need for soft robotic platforms that perform gentle, precise handling of a wide variety of objects. Existing surface-based manipulation systems, however, lack the compliance and tactile feedback needed for delicate…
This work presents a soft continuum robot (SCR) that can be used as a soft continuum manipulator (SCM) and a soft snake robot (SSR). This is achieved using expanded polyethylene foam (EPE) modules as the soft material. In situations like…
We examine the problem of snake-like locomotion by studying a system consisting of a planar inextensible elastic rod that is able to control its spontaneous curvature. Using a Cosserat model we derive, through variational principles, the…