Related papers: Bridging Hard and Soft: Mechanical Metamaterials E…
The complex behavior of highly deformable mechanical metamaterials can substantially enhance the performance of soft robots.
Soft robots can exhibit diverse behaviors with simple types of actuation by partially outsourcing control to the morphological and material properties of their soft bodies, which is made possible by the tight coupling between control, body,…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Soft Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, can be considered as the "dual" of traditional rigid-bodied robots in terms of manipulability, degrees of freedom, and compliance. Introduced two decades ago, continuum arms have not…
We introduce a robust control architecture for the whole-body motion control of torque controlled robots with arms and legs. The method is based on the robust control of contact forces in order to track a planned Center of Mass trajectory.…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
Soft robots have become increasingly popular for complex manipulation tasks requiring gentle and safe contact. However, their softness makes accurate control challenging, and high-fidelity sensing is a prerequisite to adequate control…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
Soft robotic actuators can simplify the design of controllers when operating in contact-rich environments. Importantly, their passive compliance fundamentally alters contact mechanics by smoothing impacts and distributing forces over large…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings. In this…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…
We present a robot-to-human object handover algorithm and implement it on a 7-DOF arm equipped with a 3-finger mechanical hand. The system performs a fully autonomous and robust object handover to a human receiver in real-time. Our…
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…
Soft robots have immense potential given their inherent safety and adaptability, but challenges in soft actuator forces and design constraints have limited scaling up soft robots to larger sizes. Electrothermal shape memory alloy (SMA)…
Dynamic motions are a key feature of robotic arms, enabling them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Soft continuum manipulators do not currently consider dynamic parameters when operating in task space. This shortcoming makes…
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…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Non-reciprocal transmission of motion is potentially highly beneficial to a wide range of applications, ranging from wave guiding, to shock and vibration damping and energy harvesting. To date, large levels of non-reciprocity have been…
While soft robot manipulators offer compelling advantages over rigid counterparts, including inherent compliance, safe human-robot interaction, and the ability to conform to complex geometries, accurate forward modeling from low-dimensional…