Related papers: FilMBot: A High-Speed Soft Parallel Robotic Microm…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
Animals locomote robustly and agile, albeit significant sensorimotor delays of their nervous system. The sensorimotor control of legged robots is implemented with much higher frequencies-often in the kilohertz range-and sensor and actuator…
Soft robots are promising for manipulation tasks thanks to their compliance, safety, and high degree of freedom. However, the commonly used bidirectional continuum segment design means soft robotic manipulators only function in a limited…
Small-scale robots hold great potential for targeted cargo delivery in minimally-inv asive medicine. However, current robots often face challenges to locomote efficiently on slip pery biological tissue surfaces, especially when loaded with…
Industrial robots are increasingly deployed in applications requiring an end effector tool to closely track a specified path, such as in spraying and welding. Performance and productivity present possibly conflicting objectives: tracking…
Fluid-based soft actuators are an attractive option for lightweight and human-safe robots. These actuators, combined with fluid pressure force feedback, are in principle a form of series-elastic actuation (SEA), in which nearly all…
In this paper, a legless capsule robot (capsubot) comprised of a sealed external body, an internal body, and a rotational actuator is proposed. The aim of this robot is to move in a two-dimensional viscous environment. After the robot is…
Under-actuated compliant robotic systems offer a promising approach to mitigating actuation and control challenges by harnessing pre-designed, embodied dynamic behaviors. This paper presents Flix-Walker, a novel, untethered,…
In narrow, unstructured underwater environments such as environmental monitoring and minimally invasive medical procedures, micro soft robots exhibit unique advantages due to their flexible movement capabilities and small size. At the same…
Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be…
SLOT (Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot with 3D-printed TPU legs, is presented to study physics-informed modeling and control of compliant legged locomotion using only four actuators. Each leg is…
Soft robotic systems offer benefits over traditional rigid systems through reduced contact trauma with soft tissues and by enabling access through tortuous paths in minimally invasive surgery. However, the inherent deformability of soft…
In this paper, we propose a real-world benchmark for studying robotic learning in the context of functional manipulation: a robot needs to accomplish complex long-horizon behaviors by composing individual manipulation skills in functionally…
Physical joint limits are common in legged robots and can restrict workspace, constrain gait design, and increase the risk of hardware damage. This paper introduces MiNI-Q^2, a miniature, wire-free quadruped robot with independently…
The last few decades have witnessed an emerging trend of wearable soft sensors; however, there are important signal-processing challenges for soft sensors that still limit their practical deployment. They are error-prone when displaced,…
This paper proposes a new variable stiffness soft gripper that enables high-performance grasping tasks in industrial applications. The design of the proposed monolithic soft gripper includes a middle bellow and two side bellows (i.e.,…
Safe operation is essential for deploying robots in human-centered 3D environments. Soft continuum manipulators provide passive safety through mechanical compliance, but still require active control to achieve reliable collision avoidance.…
We present an evolved steerable version of the single-tail Fish-&-Ribbon-Inspired Small Swimming Harmonic roBot (FRISSHBot), a 59-mg biologically inspired swimmer, which is driven by a new shape-memory alloy (SMA)-based bimorph actuator.…
This paper aims to study a specific kind of parallel robot: Spherical Parallel Manipulators (SPM) that are capable of unlimited rolling. A focus is made on the kinematics of such mechanisms, especially taking into account uncertainties…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…