Related papers: No-brainer: Morphological Computation driven Adapt…

Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance…

Active soft bodies can affect their shape through an internal actuation mechanism that induces a deformation. Similar to recent work, this paper utilizes a differentiable, quasi-static, and physics-based simulation layer to optimize for…

We present a computational design system that assists users to model, optimize, and fabricate quad-robots with soft skins.Our system addresses the challenging task of predicting their physical behavior by fully integrating the multibody…

Softening and onboarding computers and controllers is one of the final frontiers in soft robotics towards their robustness and intelligence for everyday use. In this regard, embodying soft and physical computing presents exciting potential.…

Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…

Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…

Providing artificial agents with the same computational models of biological systems is a way to understand how intelligent behaviours may emerge. We present an active inference body perception and action model working for the first time in…

Soft robotics technologies have gained growing interest in recent years, which allows various applications from manufacturing to human-robot interaction. Pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM), a typical soft actuator, has been widely applied to…

This article takes a step to provide humanoid robots with adaptive morphology abilities. We present a systematic approach for enabling robotic covers to morph their shape, with an overall size fitting the anthropometric dimensions of a…

Planning for robotic manipulation requires reasoning about the changes a robot can affect on objects. When such interactions can be modelled analytically, as in domains with rigid objects, efficient planning algorithms exist. However, in…

The predictive functions that permit humans to infer their body state by sensorimotor integration are critical to perform safe interaction in complex environments. These functions are adaptive and robust to non-linear actuators and noisy…

Soft robotics has opened a unique path to flexibility and environmental adaptability, learning from nature and reproducing biological behaviors. Nature implies answers for how to apply robots to real life. To find out how we learn from…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…

Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…

Morphological computing, the use of the physical design of a robot to ease the realization of a given task has been proven to be a relevant concept in the context of swarm robotics. Here we demonstrate both experimentally and numerically,…

Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…

Soft machines display shape adaptation to external circumstances due to their intrinsic compliance. To achieve increasingly more responsive behaviors upon interactions without relying on centralized computation, embodying memory directly in…

We posit that embodied artificial intelligence is not only a computational, but also a materials problem. While the importance of material and structural properties in the control loop are well understood, materials can take an active role…

The vision of creating entirely-soft robots capable of performing complex tasks will be accomplished only when the controllers required for autonomous operation can be fully implemented on soft components. Despite recent advances in…