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Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…

In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…

Soft robotic systems offer benefits over traditional rigid systems through reduced contact trauma with soft tissues and by enabling access through tortuous paths in minimally invasive surgery. However, the inherent deformability of soft…

Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…

This study deals with the balance of humanoid or multi-legged robots in a multi-contact setting where a chosen subset of contacts is undergoing desired sliding-task motions. One method to keep balance is to hold the center-of-mass (CoM)…

Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…

Physical interaction between humans and robots can help robots learn to perform complex tasks. The robot arm gains information by observing how the human kinesthetically guides it throughout the task. While prior works focus on how the…

Humans' ability to smoothly switch between locomotion and manipulation is a remarkable feature of sensorimotor coordination. Leaning and replication of such human-like strategies can lead to the development of more sophisticated robots…

Soft robotic actuators can simplify the design of controllers when operating in contact-rich environments. Importantly, their passive compliance fundamentally alters contact mechanics by smoothing impacts and distributing forces over large…

This work presents approaches for the estimation of quantities important for the control of the momentum of a humanoid robot. In contrast to previous approaches which use simplified models such as the Linear Inverted Pendulum Model, we…

Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…

Aerial manipulation combines the versatility and speed of flying platforms with the functional capabilities of mobile manipulation, which presents significant challenges due to the need for precise localization and control. Traditionally,…

Electro-thermally actuated origami provides a novel method for creating 3-D systems with advanced morphing and functional capabilities. However, it is currently difficult to simulate the multi-physical behavior of such systems because the…

Soft and lightweight grippers have greatly enhanced the performance of robotic manipulators in handling complex objects with varying shape, texture, and stiffness. However, the combination of universal grasping with passive sensing…

Soft bodies made from flexible and deformable materials are popular in many robotics applications, but their proprioceptive sensing has been a long-standing challenge. In other words, there has hardly been a method to measure and model the…

Autonomous systems face the intricate challenge of navigating unpredictable environments and interacting with external objects. The successful integration of robotic agents into real-world situations hinges on their perception capabilities,…

Object manipulation in robotics faces challenges due to diverse object shapes, sizes, and fragility. Gripper-based methods offer precision and low degrees of freedom (DOF) but the gripper limits the kind of objects to grasp. On the other…

Human-machine interaction (HMI) and human-robot interaction (HRI) can assist structural monitoring and structural dynamics testing in the laboratory and field. In vibratory experimentation, one mode of generating vibration is to use…

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…

Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…