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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…
Surgical robots have had clinical use since the mid 1990s. Robot-assisted surgeries offer many benefits over the conventional approach including lower risk of infection and blood loss, shorter recovery, and an overall safer procedure for…
Assistive technologies and in particular assistive robotic arms have the potential to enable people with motor impairments to live a self-determined life. More and more of these systems have become available for end users in recent years,…
Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. As the human kinesthetically guides the robot through demonstrations, the robot learns the desired task. While prior works focus on how the robot learns, it is equally important…
Robots are expected to grasp a wide range of objects varying in shape, weight or material type. Providing robots with tactile capabilities similar to humans is thus essential for applications involving human-to-robot or robot-to-robot…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
In-hand manipulation is a crucial ability for reorienting and repositioning objects within grasps. The main challenges in this are not only the complexity of the computational models, but also the risks of grasp instability caused by active…
A vacuum lifter is widely used to hold and pick up large, heavy, and flat objects. Conventionally, when using a vacuum lifter, a human worker watches the state of a running vacuum lifter and adjusts the object's pose to maintain balance. In…
Cooking robots can enhance the home experience by reducing the burden of daily chores. However, these robots must perform their tasks dexterously and safely in shared human environments, especially when handling dangerous tools such as…
Fully soft bistable mechanisms have shown extensive applications ranging from soft robotics, wearable devices, and medical tools, to energy harvesting. However, the lack of design and fabrication methods that are easy and potentially…
The logarithmic spiral is observed as a common pattern in several living beings across kingdoms and species. Some examples include fern shoots, prehensile tails, and soft limbs like octopus arms and elephant trunks. In the latter cases,…
Robot-to-human handovers often rely on static, open-loop strategies (or, at best, approaches that adapt only the position), which generally do not consider how the object will be grasped by the human, thus requiring the user to adapt. This…
The ability to perform in-hand manipulation still remains an unsolved problem; having this capability would allow robots to perform sophisticated tasks requiring repositioning and reorienting of grasped objects. In this work, we present a…
Teleoperation is often limited by the ability of an operator to react and predict the behavior of the robot as it interacts with the environment. For example, to grasp small objects on a table, the teleoperator needs to predict the position…
Tree fruit growers around the world are facing labor shortages for critical operations, including harvest and pruning. There is a great interest in developing robotic solutions for these labor-intensive tasks, but current efforts have been…
Numerous diseases and aging can cause degeneration of people's balance ability resulting in limited mobility and even high risks of fall. Robotic technologies can provide more intensive rehabilitation exercises or be used as assistive…
Robot hands that imitate the shape of the human body have been actively studied, and various materials and mechanisms have been proposed to imitate the human body. Although the use of soft materials is advantageous in that it can imitate…
Multi-degree of freedom robots are playing very important role in different applications of automation. They are providing much more accuracy in carrying out a typical procedure as compared to the manual work done by human. In recent years…
Morphing surfaces provide a versatile tool to advance the functionalities of high-performance aircraft, soft robots, biomedical devices, and human-machine interfaces. However, achieving precise shape transformation and mechanical property…
The global agri-food sector faces increasing challenges from labour shortages, high consumer demand, and supply-chain disruptions, resulting in substantial losses of unharvested produce. Robotic harvesting has emerged as a promising…