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Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
Robots are notoriously difficult to design because of complex interdependencies between their physical structure, sensory and motor layouts, and behavior. Despite this, almost every detail of every robot built to date has been manually…
The design process and complexity of existing safety controls are heavily determined by the geometrical properties of the environment, which affects the proof of convergence, design scalability, performance robustness, and numerical…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
Accurate robot kinematics is essential for precise tool placement in articulated robots, but non-geometric factors can introduce configuration-dependent model discrepancies. This paper presents a configuration-dependent kinematic…
Robotic grinding is widely used for shaping workpieces in manufacturing, but it remains difficult to automate this process efficiently. In particular, efficiently grinding workpieces of different shapes and material hardness is challenging…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interactions with…
The pattern formation task is commonly seen in a multi-robot system. In this paper, we study the problem of forming complex shapes with functionally limited mobile robots, which have to rely on other robots to precisely locate themselves.…
The configuration of most robotic systems lies in continuous transformation groups. However, in mobile robot trajectory tracking, many recent works still naively utilize optimization methods for elements in vector space without considering…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
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…
Deformable objects manipulation can benefit from representations that seamlessly integrate vision and touch while handling occlusions. In this work, we present a novel approach for, and real-world demonstration of, multimodal visuo-tactile…
Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…
Understanding structure-property relations is essential to optimally design materials for specific applications. Two-scale simulations are often employed to analyze the effect of the microstructure on a component's macroscopic properties.…
Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials such as foam,…
This paper proposes a novel paradigm for machine learning that moves beyond traditional parameter optimization. Unlike conventional approaches that search for optimal parameters within a fixed geometric space, our core idea is to treat the…
Soft robots enable safe, adaptive interaction with complex environments but remain difficult to sense and control due to their highly deformable structures. Architected soft materials such as helicoid lattices offer tunable stiffness and…
Continuum robots (CRs), owing to their compact structure, inherent compliance, and flexible deformation, have been widely applied in various fields. By coordinating multiple CRs to form collaborative continuum robots (CCRs), task…
This paper addresses the problem of controlling a continuum manipulator (CM) in free or obstructed environments with no prior knowledge about the deformation behavior of the CM and the stiffness and geometry of the interacting obstructed…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…