Related papers: Actuators \`A La Mode: Modal Actuations for Soft B…
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,…
We present a differentiable dynamics solver that is able to handle frictional contact for rigid and deformable objects within a unified framework. Through a principled mollification of normal and tangential contact forces, our method…
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation…
Biological function of living matter is fulfilled by complex motions of biological and soft matter. Unlike general motion is deterministic described by Newton's laws, these motions are mostly random and uncertain for the position in…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
The production of animation is a resource intensive process in game companies. Therefore, techniques to synthesize animations have been developed. However, these procedural techniques offer limited adaptability by animation artists. In…
This paper presents Master of Puppets (MOP), an animation-by-demonstration framework that allows users to control the motion of virtual characters (puppets) in real time. In the first step, the user is asked to perform the necessary actions…
Soft robots, in contrast to their rigid counter parts, have infinite degrees of freedom that are coupled with their interaction with the environment. We consider the locomotion of an untethered robot, in the granular medium, comprised of…
Simulating realistic interaction and motions for physics-based characters is of great interest for interactive applications, and automatic secondary character animation in the movie and video game industries. Recent works in reinforcement…
Much of the Earth and many surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies are composed of in-cohesive particle matter. Locomoting on granular terrain is challenging for common robotic devices, either wheeled or legged. In this work, we discover a…
Embodying non-human characters and exercising abdominal muscles are both underexplored in exergames. We address this by describing the design and evaluation of a novel human quadruped locomotion exergame. In the game, the player lies supine…
Most locomotion methods for humanoid robots focus on leg-based gaits, yet natural bipeds frequently rely on hands, knees, and elbows to establish additional contacts for stability and support in complex environments. This paper introduces…
We present a method to build animatable dog avatars from monocular videos. This is challenging as animals display a range of (unpredictable) non-rigid movements and have a variety of appearance details (e.g., fur, spots, tails). We develop…
Text-to-motion diffusion models can generate realistic animations from text prompts, but do not support fine-grained motion editing controls. In this paper, we present a method for using natural language to iteratively specify local edits…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…
Following the paradigm set by attraction-repulsion-alignment schemes, a myriad of individual based models have been proposed to calculate the evolution of abstract agents. While the emergent features of many agent systems have been…
This paper proposes a modular framework to generate robust biped locomotion using a tight coupling between an analytical walking approach and deep reinforcement learning. This framework is composed of six main modules which are…
We present a parallel robot mechanism and the constitutive laws that govern the deformation of its constituent soft actuators. Our ultimate goal is the real-time motion-correction of a patient's head deviation from a target pose where the…
The functional demands of robotic systems often require completing various tasks or behaviors under the effect of disturbances or uncertain environments. Of increasing interest is the autonomy for dynamic robots, such as multirotors, motor…