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Deformable object manipulation (DOM) represents a critical challenge in robotics, with applications spanning healthcare, manufacturing, food processing, and beyond. Unlike rigid objects, deformable objects exhibit infinite dimensionality,…
Recent studies have demonstrated the immense potential of exploiting muscle actuator morphology for natural and robust movement -- in simulation. A validation on real robotic hardware is yet missing. In this study, we emulate muscle…
We present a computational design system that assists users to model, optimize, and fabricate quad-robots with soft skins.Our system addresses the challenging task of predicting their physical behavior by fully integrating the multibody…
Uncertainties in contact dynamics and object geometry remain significant barriers to robust robotic manipulation. Caging mitigates these uncertainties by constraining an object's mobility without requiring precise contact modeling. However,…
Designing robots by hand can be costly and time consuming, especially if the robots have to be created with novel materials, or be robust to internal or external changes. In order to create robots automatically, without the need for human…
Reconfigurable robot swarms are capable of connecting with each other to form complex structures. Current mechanical or magnetic connection mechanisms can be complicated to manufacture, consume high power, have a limited load-bearing…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…
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…
For robot manipulation, both the controller and end-effector design are crucial. Soft grippers are generalizable by deforming to different geometries, but designing such a gripper and finding its grasp pose remains challenging. In this…
This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement (DRL) Learning to address motion control challenges in drones for additive manufacturing (AM). Drone-based additive manufacturing promises flexible and autonomous material…
The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority of design decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way of facing this task is computational design methods where design parameters…
Humanoid robots represent a central frontier in embodied intelligence, as their anthropomorphic form enables natural deployment in humans' workspace. Brain-body co-design for humanoids presents a promising approach to realizing this…
Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…
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…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Evolving morphologies and controllers of robots simultaneously leads to a problem: Even if the parents have well-matching bodies and brains, the stochastic recombination can break this match and cause a body-brain mismatch in their…
Soft robots have gained increased popularity in recent years due to their adaptability and compliance. In this paper, we use a digital twin model of cable-driven soft robots to learn control parameters in simulation. In doing so, we take…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
Real time calculation of inverse kinematics (IK) with dynamically stable configuration is of high necessity in humanoid robots as they are highly susceptible to lose balance. This paper proposes a methodology to generate joint-space…
Robotic manipulation is essential for modernizing factories and automating industrial tasks like polishing, which require advanced tactile abilities. These robots must be easily set up, safely work with humans, learn tasks autonomously, and…