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Existing grasp synthesis methods are either analytical or data-driven. The former one is oftentimes limited to specific application scope. The latter one depends heavily on demonstrations, thus suffers from generalization issues; e.g.,…
Autonomy in robot-assisted surgery is essential to reduce surgeons' cognitive load and eventually improve the overall surgical outcome. A key requirement for autonomy in a safety-critical scenario as surgery lies in the generation of…
Microscale manipulation has advanced substantially in controlled locomotion and targeted transport, yet many biomedical applications require precise and adaptive interaction with biological micro-objects. At these scales, manipulation is…
The presence of post-stroke grasping deficiencies highlights the critical need for the development and implementation of advanced compensatory strategies. This paper introduces a novel system to aid chronic stroke survivors through the…
Robot-assisted dressing could profoundly enhance the quality of life of adults with physical disabilities. To achieve this, a robot can benefit from both visual and force sensing. The former enables the robot to ascertain human body pose…
Existing grasp controllers usually either only support finger-tip grasps or need explicit configuration of the inner forces. We propose a novel grasp controller that supports arbitrary grasp types, including power grasps with…
Many manipulation tasks require careful force modulation. With insufficient force the task may fail, while excessive force could cause damage. The high cost, bulky size and fragility of commercial force/torque (F/T) sensors have limited…
Soft robotic grippers facilitate contact-rich manipulation, including robust grasping of varied objects. Yet the beneficial compliance of a soft gripper also results in significant deformation that can make precision manipulation…
In rehabilitation, powered, and teleoperation exoskeletons, connecting the human body to the exoskeleton through binding attachments is a common configuration. However, the uncertainty of the tightness and the donning deviation of the…
Despite significant advancements in wireless smart implants over the last two decades, current implantable devices still operate passively and require additional electronic modules for wireless transmission of the stored biological data. To…
In this paper we report, clarify and broaden various recent efforts to complement the chemistry-centered models of force generation in muscles by mechanics-centered models. The physical mechanisms of interest can be grouped into two…
The lack of haptically aware upper-limb prostheses forces amputees to rely largely on visual cues to complete activities of daily living. In contrast, able-bodied individuals inherently rely on conscious haptic perception and automatic…
Robotics enables a variety of unconventional actuation strategies to be used for endoscopes, resulting in reduced trauma to the GI tract. For transmission of force to distally mounted endoscopic instruments, robotically actuated tendon…
A novel sensory substitution technique is presented. Kinesthetic and cutaneous force feedback are substituted by cutaneous feedback (CF) only, provided by two wearable devices able to apply forces to the index finger and the thumb, while…
The functional replication and actuation of complex structures inspired by nature is a longstanding goal for humanity. Creating such complex structures combining soft and rigid features and actuating them with artificial muscles would…
The tactile properties of tissue, such as elasticity and stiffness, often play an important role in surgical oncology when identifying tumors and pathological tissue boundaries. Though extremely valuable, robot-assisted surgery comes at the…
Dexterous manipulation, especially of small daily objects, continues to pose complex challenges in robotics. This paper introduces the DenseTact-Mini, an optical tactile sensor with a soft, rounded, smooth gel surface and compact design…
To rationalize the relatively high investment that industrial automation systems entail, research in the field of intelligent machines should target high value functions such as fettling, die-finishing, deburring, and fixtureless…
Background: Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) research increasingly relies on multimodal data, yet access to proprietary robot telemetry remains a major barrier. We introduce MiDAS, an open-source, platform-agnostic system…
In this paper, a novel tactile sensing mechanism for soft robotic fingers is proposed. Inspired by the proprioception mechanism found in mammals, the proposed approach infers tactile information from a strain sensor attached on the finger's…