Related papers: Bridging Hard and Soft: Mechanical Metamaterials E…
The manipulation of large objects and safe operation in the vicinity of humans are key capabilities of a general purpose domestic robotic assistant. We present the design of a soft, tactile-sensing humanoid upper-body robot and demonstrate…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…
This paper proposes a new control framework for manipulating soft objects. A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach is used to make the shape of a deformable object reach a set of desired points by controlling a robotic arm which…
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…
Classical rigid-bodied robotic systems are presented with proven success in theoretical development and industrial applications, are recently challenged by the emergence of soft robotics due to a growing need in physical human-robot…
This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…
Machines that mimic humans have inspired scientists for centuries. Bio-inspired soft robotic hands are a good example of such an endeavor, featuring intrinsic material compliance and continuous motion to deal with uncertainty and adapt to…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Mechanical metamaterials are structures designed to exhibit an exotic response, such as topological soft modes at a surface. Here we explore single-material 3D prints of these topological structures by translating a ball-and-spring model…
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…
Soft-robot designs are manifold, but only a few are publicly available. Often, these are only briefly described in their publications. This complicates reproduction, and hinders the reproducibility and comparability of research results. If…
In the context of surgery, robots can provide substantial assistance by performing small, repetitive tasks such as suturing, needle exchange, and tissue retraction, thereby enabling surgeons to concentrate on more complex aspects of the…
Attempts to install a rotating tool at the end of a robot arm poly-articulated date back twenty years, but these robots were not designed for that. Indeed, two essential features are necessary for machining: high rigidity and precision in a…
Closed-loop control remains an open challenge in soft robotics. The nonlinear responses of soft actuators under dynamic loading conditions limit the use of analytic models for soft robot control. Traditional methods of controlling soft…
Soft robotics technologies have gained growing interest in recent years, which allows various applications from manufacturing to human-robot interaction. Pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM), a typical soft actuator, has been widely applied to…
Humanoid robots are expected to operate in human-centered environments where safe and natural physical interaction is essential. However, most recent reinforcement learning (RL) policies emphasize rigid tracking and suppress external…
Recent advances in active materials and fabrication techniques have enabled the production of cyclically self-deployable metamaterials with an expanded functionality space. However, designing metamaterials that possess continuously tunable…
The flexible under-actuated musculoskeletal hand is superior in its adaptability and impact resistance. On the other hand, since the relationship between sensors and actuators cannot be uniquely determined, almost all its controls are based…
For soft continuum arms, visual servoing is a popular control strategy that relies on visual feedback to close the control loop. However, robust visual servoing is challenging as it requires reliable feature extraction from the image,…
Soft robots are challenging to model due in large part to the nonlinear properties of soft materials. Fortunately, this softness makes it possible to safely observe their behavior under random control inputs, making them amenable to…