Related papers: Hold 'em and Fold 'em: Towards Human-scale, Feedba…

Being aware of our body has great importance in our everyday life. This is the reason why we know how to move in a dark room or to grasp a complex object. These skills are important for robots as well, however, robotic bodily awareness is…

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…

This paper presents design, fabrication and control of a compliant 2D manipulator, a so called soft actuator. Our focus is on fiber-reinforced elastomer actuators driven by a constant pressure hydraulic supply and modulated on/off valves.…

We define "robotic contact juggling" to be the purposeful control of the motion of a three-dimensional smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or "hand." While specific examples of robotic contact juggling…

Many industries extensively use flexible materials. Effective approaches for handling flexible objects with a robot manipulator must address residual vibrations. Existing solutions rely on complex models, use additional instrumentation for…

This paper presents a feedback-control framework for in-hand manipulation (IHM) with dexterous soft hands that enables the acquisition of manipulation skills in the real-world within minutes. We choose the deformation state of the soft hand…

Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…

Soft actuators have drawn significant attention from researchers with an inherently compliant design to address the safety issues in physical human-robot interactions. However, they are also vulnerable and pose new challenges in the design,…

In this paper, we investigate the synthesis of piecewise affine feedback controllers to address the problem of safe and robust controller design in robotics based on high-level controls specifications. The methodology is based on…

A key challenge in robotics is to create efficient methods for grasping objects with diverse shapes, sizes, poses, and properties. Grasping with hand-like end effectors often requires careful selection of hand orientation and finger…

We present ActiveUMI, a framework for a data collection system that transfers in-the-wild human demonstrations to robots capable of complex bimanual manipulation. ActiveUMI couples a portable VR teleoperation kit with sensorized controllers…

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,…

Highly constrained manipulation tasks continue to be challenging for autonomous robots as they require high levels of precision, typically less than 1mm, which is often incompatible with what can be achieved by traditional perception…

Origami, the traditional paper-folding art, has inspired the modern design of numerous flexible structures in science and engineering. In particular, origami structures with different physical properties have been studied and utilized for…

Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…

Accurate manipulation of a deformable body such as a piece of fabric is difficult because of its many degrees of freedom and unobservable properties affecting its dynamics. To alleviate these challenges, we propose the application of…

Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…

This paper presents a design methodology of a hydraulically-driven soft robotic gripper for grasping a large and heavy object -- approximately 10 - 20 kg with 20 - 30 cm diameter. Most existing soft grippers are pneumatically actuated with…

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…

Soft robotics is a modern robotic paradigm for performing dexterous interactions with the surroundings via morphological flexibility. The desire for autonomous operation requires soft robots to be capable of proprioception and makes it…