Related papers: SoftSnap: Rapid Prototyping of Untethered Soft Rob…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
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…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
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…
One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…
The robotics community has seen an exponential growth in the level of complexity of the theoretical tools presented for the modeling of soft robotics devices. Different solutions have been presented to overcome the difficulties related to…
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…
Realizing a soft manipulator with biologically comparable flexibility and versatility often requires careful selection of materials and actuation, as well as attentive design of its structure, perception, and control. Here, we report a new…
Untethered soft robots are essential for advancing the real-world deployment of soft robotic systems in diverse and multitasking environments. Inspired by soft-bodied inchworm, we present a fully untethered soft robot with a curved,…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Soft robots offer remarkable adaptability and safety advantages over rigid robots, but modeling their complex, nonlinear dynamics remains challenging. Strain-based models have recently emerged as a promising candidate to describe such…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Simulation is an important step in robotics for creating control policies and testing various physical parameters. Soft robotics is a field that presents unique physical challenges for simulating its subjects due to the nonlinearity of…
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…
Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects. Adoption…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…
Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control,…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…