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Spatial computing -- the ability of devices to be aware of their surroundings and to represent this digitally -- offers novel capabilities in human-robot interaction. In particular, the combination of spatial computing and egocentric…

Zoomorphic Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) offer an alternative source of social touch for individuals who cannot access animal companionship. However, current SARs provide only limited, passive touch-based interactions and lack the rich…

While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…

Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…

Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and…

Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal, we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to design…

Advancing dexterous manipulation with multi-fingered robotic hands requires rich sensory capabilities, while existing designs lack onboard thermal and torque sensing. In this work, we propose the MOTIF hand, a novel multimodal and versatile…

The research aims to expand tactile feedback beyond vibrations to various modes of stimuli, such as indentation, vibration, among others. By incorporating soft material into the design of a novel tactile actuator, we can achieve…

The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…

The teleoperation of complex, kinematically redundant robots with loco-manipulation capabilities represents a challenge for human operators, who have to learn how to operate the many degrees of freedom of the robot to accomplish a desired…

Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…

This article presents a new hand architecture with three under-actuated fingers. Each finger performs spatial movements to achieve more complex and varied grasping than the existing planar-movement fingers. The purpose of this hand is to…

There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…

Physical interaction between humans and robots can help robots learn to perform complex tasks. The robot arm gains information by observing how the human kinesthetically guides it throughout the task. While prior works focus on how the…

We present a new open-source torque-controlled legged robot system, with a low-cost and low-complexity actuator module at its core. It consists of a high-torque brushless DC motor and a low-gear-ratio transmission suitable for impedance and…

Teleoperation of robotic systems for precise and delicate object grasping requires high-fidelity haptic feedback to obtain comprehensive real-time information about the grasp. In such cases, the most common approach is to use kinesthetic…

Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…

Exploiting the promise of recent advances in imitation learning for mobile manipulation will require the collection of large numbers of human-guided demonstrations. This paper proposes an open-source design for an inexpensive, robust, and…

This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…

We present Shape-Haptics, an approach for designers to rapidly design and fabricate passive force feedback mechanisms for physical interfaces. Such mechanisms are used in everyday interfaces and tools, and they are challenging to design.…