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Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
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 human-robot interactions, eye movements play an important role in non-verbal communication. However, controlling the motions of a robotic eye that display similar performance as the human oculomotor system is still a major challenge. In…
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…
Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…
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,…
Practical use of robotic manipulators made from soft materials requires generating and executing complex motions. We present the first approach for generating trajectories of a thermally-actuated soft robotic manipulator. Based on…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Continuum robots, inspired by octopus arms and elephant trunks, combine dexterity with intrinsic compliance, making them well suited for unstructured and confined environments. Yet their continuously deformable morphology poses challenges…
Origami offers a promising alternative for designing innovative soft robotic actuators. While features of origami, such as bi-directional motion and structural anisotropy, haven't been extensively explored in the past, this letter presents…
We explore how high-speed robot arm motions can dynamically manipulate cables to vault over obstacles, knock objects from pedestals, and weave between obstacles. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning framework that enables a…
Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…
Soft grippers are receiving growing attention due to their compliance-based interactive safety and dexterity. Hybrid gripper (soft actuators enhanced by rigid constraints) is a new trend in soft gripper design. With right structural…
Flexible octopus arms exhibit an exceptional ability to coordinate large numbers of degrees of freedom and perform complex manipulation tasks. As a consequence, these systems continue to attract the attention of biologists and roboticists…
The Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) model is the most widely used soft robotic modeling and control. However, the PCC fails to accurately describe the deformation of the soft robots when executing dynamic tasks or interacting with the…
Soft manipulators are known for their superiority in coping with high-safety-demanding interaction tasks, e.g., robot-assisted surgeries, elderly caring, etc. Yet the challenges residing in real-time contact feedback have hindered further…
Control of soft robotic manipulators remains a challenge for designs with advanced capabilities and novel actuation. Two significant limitations are multi-axis, three-dimensional motion of soft bodies alongside actuator dynamics and…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Controlling soft continuum robotic arms is challenging due to their hyper-redundancy and dexterity. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop control of the configuration space variables of a soft robotic arm, composed…
Muscular hydrostats, such as octopus arms or elephant trunks, lack bones entirely, endowing them with exceptional dexterity and reconfigurability. Key to their unmatched ability to control nearly infinite degrees of freedom is the…