Related papers: Embodying Control in Soft Multistable Robots from …
Controlling soft continuum manipulator arms is difficult due to their infinite degrees of freedom, nonlinear material properties, and large deflections under loading. This paper presents a data-driven approach to identifying soft…
Replicating and surpassing the autonomy of natural organisms remains a long-standing goal in robotics. Yet most robotic systems have their structure, materials, and control designed separately, in sharp contrast to the co-evolution in…
Modular soft robots have shown higher potential in sophisticated tasks than single-module robots. However, the modular structure incurs the complexity of accurate control and necessitates a control strategy specifically for modular robots.…
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…
Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal…
Optimizing the body and brain of a robot is a coupled challenge: the morphology determines what control strategies are effective, while the control parameters influence how well the morphology performs. This joint optimization can be done…
Soft actuators offer compliant and safe interaction with an unstructured environment compared to their rigid counterparts. However, control of these systems is often challenging because they are inherently under-actuated, have infinite…
Soft continuum robots achieve complex deformation through elastic equilibrium, making their reachable motions governed jointly by structural design and actuation-induced mechanics. This work develops a general formulation that integrates…
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a…
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…
Direct design of a robot's rendered dynamics, such as in impedance control, is now a well-established control mode in uncertain environments. When the physical interaction port variables are not measured directly, dynamic and kinematic…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
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…
Designing robot morphologies and kinematics has traditionally relied on human intuition, with little systematic foundation. Motion-design co-optimization offers a promising path toward automation, but two major challenges remain: (i) the…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
Understanding the physical interaction with wearable robots is essential to ensure safety and comfort. However, this interaction is complex in two key aspects: (1) the motion involved, and (2) the non-linear behaviour of soft tissues.…
Whereas naturally occurring swarms thrive when crowded, physical interactions in robotic swarms are either avoided or carefully controlled, thus limiting their operational density. Here we present a mechanical design rule that allows robots…
Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…
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…
Soft robotic manipulators are attractive for a range of applications such as medical interventions or industrial inspections in confined environments. A myriad of soft robotic manipulators have been proposed in the literature, but their…