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Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials such as foam,…
While its biological significance is well-documented, its application in soft robotics, particularly for the transport of fragile and irregularly shaped objects, remains underexplored. This study presents a modular soft robotic actuator…
Communicating the robot state is vital to creating an efficient and trustworthy collaboration between humans and collaborative robots (cobots). Standard approaches for Robot-to-human communication face difficulties in industry settings,…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…
Human acceptance of social robots is greatly effected by empathy and perceived understanding. This necessitates accurate and flexible responses to various input data from the user. While systems such as this can become increasingly complex…
Implicit communication plays such a crucial role during social exchanges that it must be considered for a good experience in human-robot interaction. This work addresses implicit communication associated with the detection of physical…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
SLOT (Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot with 3D-printed TPU legs, is presented to study physics-informed modeling and control of compliant legged locomotion using only four actuators. Each leg is…
Biomimetic entirely soft robots with animal-like behavior and integrated artificial nervous systems will open up totally new perspectives and applications. However, until now all presented studies on soft robots were limited to partly soft…
This paper presents a computational model of the processing of dynamic spatial relations occurring in an embodied robotic interaction setup. A complete system is introduced that allows autonomous robots to produce and interpret dynamic…
Humanoid robots are capable of performing various actions such as greeting, dancing and even backflipping. However, these motions are often hard-coded or specifically trained, which limits their versatility. In this work, we present…
Next generation robots will need to understand intricate and articulated objects as they cooperate in human environments. To do so, these robots will need to move beyond their current abilities--- working with relatively simple objects in a…
We introduce PuppetAI, a modular soft robot interaction platform. This platform offers a scalable cable-driven actuation system and a customizable, puppet-inspired robot gesture framework, supporting a multitude of interaction gesture robot…
Wearable robots are undergoing a disruptive transition, from the rigid machines that populated the science-fiction world in the early eighties to lightweight robotic apparel, hardly distinguishable from our daily clothes. In less than a…
Most robot manipulation focuses on changing the kinematic state of objects: picking, placing, opening, or rotating them. However, a wide range of real-world manipulation tasks involve a different class of object state change--such as…
We propose the Extended Reality Universal Planning Toolkit (ERUPT), an extended reality (XR) system for interactive motion planning. Our system allows users to create and dynamically reconfigure environments while they plan robot paths. In…
Pneumatically operated soft growing robots that extend via tip eversion are well-suited for navigation in confined spaces. Adding the ability to interact with the environment using sensors and tools attached to the robot tip would greatly…
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…
Robots and artificial machines have been captivating the public for centuries, depicted first as threats to humanity, then as subordinates and helpers. In the last decade, the booming exposure of humans to robots has fostered an increasing…