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The vision of creating entirely-soft robots capable of performing complex tasks will be accomplished only when the controllers required for autonomous operation can be fully implemented on soft components. Despite recent advances in…
Modular soft robots combine the strengths of two traditionally separate areas of robotics. As modular robots, they can show robustness to individual failure and reconfigurability; as soft robots, they can deform and undergo large shape…
High-speed machinery is often designed to pass several $"$critical$"$ speeds, where vibration levels can be very high. To reduce vibrations, rotors usually undergo a mass balancing process, where the machine is rotated at its full speed…
Trajectory optimization is the core of modern model-based robotic control and motion planning. Existing trajectory optimizers, based on sequential quadratic programming (SQP) or differential dynamic programming (DDP), are often limited by…
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…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
Snake robots are characterized by their ability to navigate through small spaces and loose terrain by utilizing efficient cyclic forms of locomotion. Soft snake robots are a subset of these robots which utilize soft, compliant actuators to…
Inchworm crawling allows for both quasistatic and dynamic gaits at a wide range of actuation frequencies. This locomotion mechanism is common in nonskeletal animals and exploited extensively in the bio-inspired field of soft robotics. In…
Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…
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…
Hybrid vibro-impact (HVI) oscillations is a strongly nonlinear dynamical regime that involves both linear oscillations and collisions under periodic, impulsive, or stochastic excitation. This regime arises in various engineering systems,…
Robot interaction control is often limited to low dynamics or low flexibility, depending on whether an active or passive approach is chosen. In this work, we introduce a hybrid control scheme that combines the advantages of active and…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
Origami-inspired robots are of particular interest given their potential for rapid and accessible design and fabrication of elegant designs and complex functionalities through cutting and folding of flexible 2D sheets or even strings,…
This paper evaluates the capabilities of a soft robotic pneumatic actuator derived from the terrain display haptic device, "The Smart Shoe." The bladder design of the Smart Shoe is upgraded to include a pressure supply and greater output…
For robot arms to perform everyday tasks in unstructured environments, these robots must be able to manipulate a diverse range of objects. Today's robots often grasp objects with either soft grippers or rigid end-effectors. However, purely…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…