Related papers: Geometric Design and Gait Co-Optimization for Soft…
Elongate animals and robots use undulatory body waves to locomote through diverse environments. Geometric mechanics provides a framework to model and optimize such systems in highly damped environments, connecting a prescribed shape change…
Geometric motion planning offers effective and interpretable gait analysis and optimization tools for locomoting systems. However, due to the curse of dimensionality in coordinate optimization, a key component of geometric motion planning,…
Many robotic systems locomote using gaits - periodic changes of internal shape, whose mechanical interaction with the robot's environment generate characteristic net displacements. Prominent examples with two shape variables are the low…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
Efficient swimming at low Reynolds numbers is a major concern of microbots. To compare the efficiencies of different swimmers we introduce the notion of ``swimming drag coefficient'' which allows for the ranking of swimmers. We find the…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Co-design optimization strategies usually rely on simplified robot models extracted from CAD. While these models are useful for optimizing geometrical and inertial parameters for robot control, they might overlook important details…
Depending on multiple parameters, soft robots can exhibit different modes of locomotion that are difficult to model numerically. As a result, improving their performance is complex, especially in small-scale systems characterized by low…
This study focuses on the locomotion capability improvement in a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot through an online adaptive learning approach. Leveraging the inverse kinematics model of the soft quadruped robot, we employ a central…
Robotic locomotion often relies on sequenced gaits to efficiently convert control input into desired motion. Despite extensive studies on gait optimization, achieving smooth and efficient gait transitions remains challenging. In this paper,…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel…
Many forms of locomotion, both natural and artificial, are dominated by viscous friction in the sense that without power expenditure they quickly come to a standstill. From geometric mechanics, it is known that for swimming at the…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
Deep reinforcement learning has recently been applied to a variety of robotics applications, but learning locomotion for robots with unconventional configurations is still limited. Prior work has shown that, despite the simple modeling of…
Motion planning for locomotion systems typically requires translating high-level rigid-body tasks into low-level joint trajectories-a process that is straightforward for car-like robots with fixed, unbounded actuation inputs but more…
While multi-joint continuum robots are highly dexterous and flexible, designing an optimal robot can be challenging due to its kinematics involving curvatures. Hence, the current work presents a computational method developed to find…
Selecting robot design parameters can be challenging since these parameters are often coupled with the performance of the controller and, therefore, the resulting capabilities of the robot. This leads to a time-consuming and often expensive…
Continuum robots with floating bases demonstrate exceptional operational capabilities in confined spaces, such as those encountered in medical surgeries and equipment maintenance. However, developing low-cost solutions for their motion and…