Related papers: Controlling Deformable Objects with Non-negligible…

Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and…

Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…

We consider the problem of grasping deformable objects with soft shells using a robotic gripper. Such objects have a center-of-mass that changes dynamically and are fragile so prone to burst. Thus, it is difficult for robots to generate…

Manipulation of deformable linear objects (DLOs) in constrained environments is a challenging task. This paper describes a two-layered approach for placing DLOs on a flat surface using a single robot hand. The high-level layer is a novel…

In the field of robotic manipulation, the proficiency of deformable object manipulation lags behind human capabilities due to the inherent characteristics of deformable objects. These objects have infinite degrees of freedom, resulting in…

The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting soft robots' behavior, but its computation time can limit practical applications. In this paper, a learning-based approach based on condensation of the FEM model is…

Robotic manipulation of deformable objects gains great attention due to its wide applications including medical surgery, home assistance, and automatic food preparation. The ability to deform soft objects remains a great challenge for…

In robotic deformable object manipulation (DOM) applications, constraints arise commonly from environments and task-specific requirements. Enabling DOM with constraints is therefore crucial for its deployment in practice. However, dealing…

Inspired by the octopus and other animals living in water, soft robots should naturally lend themselves to underwater operations, as supported by encouraging validations in deep water scenarios. This work deals with equipping soft arms with…

We propose reaching steps towards the real-time strain control of multiphysics, multiscale continuum soft robots. To study this problem fundamentally, we ground ourselves in a model-based control setting enabled by mathematically precise…

Model-based methods are the dominant paradigm for controlling robotic systems, though their efficacy depends heavily on the accuracy of the model used. Deep neural networks have been used to learn models of robot dynamics from data, but…

Experimental analysis of the mechanics of a deformable object, and particularly its stability, requires repetitive testing and, depending on the complexity of the object's shape, a testing setup that can manipulate many degrees of freedom…

In this work, we aim to learn dexterous manipulation of deformable objects using multi-fingered hands. Reinforcement learning approaches for dexterous rigid object manipulation would struggle in this setting due to the complexity of physics…

We examine a variety of numerical methods that arise when considering dynamical systems in the context of physics-based simulations of deformable objects. Such problems arise in various applications, including animation, robotics, control…

This paper presents a novel soft robotic system for a deformable mannequin that can be employed to physically realize the 3D geometry of different human bodies. The soft membrane on a mannequin is deformed by inflating several curved…

Accurate modelling of object deformations is crucial for a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks, where interacting with soft or deformable objects is essential. Current methods struggle to generalise to unseen forces or adapt to new…

Soft robots are challenging to model and control as inherent non-linearities (e.g., elasticity and deformation), often requires complex explicit physics-based analytical modeling (e.g., a priori geometric definitions). While machine…

Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…

This paper introduces a novel and general method to address the problem of using a general-purpose robot manipulator with a parallel gripper to wrap a deformable linear object (DLO), called a rope, around a rigid object, called a rod,…

Industrial assembly of deformable linear objects (DLOs) such as cables offers great potential for many industries. However, DLOs pose several challenges for robot-based automation due to the inherent complexity of deformation and,…