Related papers: Bridging Hard and Soft: Mechanical Metamaterials E…
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…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
The human arm exhibits remarkable capabilities, including both explosive power and precision, which demonstrate dexterity, compliance, and robustness in unstructured environments. Developing robotic systems that emulate human-like…
Sensory feedback is essential for the control of soft robotic systems and to enable deployment in a variety of different tasks. Proprioception refers to sensing the robot's own state and is of crucial importance in order to deploy soft…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Passivity is necessary for robots to fluidly collaborate and interact with humans physically. Nevertheless, due to the unconstrained nature of passivity-based impedance control laws, the robot is vulnerable to infeasible and unsafe…
Antagonistic artificial muscles can decouple joint torque and stiffness, but contact transients often degrade this independence. We present a unified real-time framework applicable across pneumatic, electrohydraulic, and dielectric…
This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position…
Advanced machine learning algorithms require platforms that are extremely robust and equipped with rich sensory feedback to handle extensive trial-and-error learning without relying on strong inductive biases. Traditional robotic designs,…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Humanoid robots are envisioned as general-purpose platforms in human-centered environments, yet their deployment is limited by vulnerability to falls and the risks posed by rigid metal-plastic structures to people and surroundings. We…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
Integrating Brain-Machine Interfaces into non-clinical applications like robot motion control remains difficult - despite remarkable advancements in clinical settings. Specifically, EEG-based motor imagery systems are still error-prone,…
Soft robotics is an emerging field of research where the robot body is composed of compliant and soft materials. It allows the body to bend, twist, and deform to move or to adapt its shape to the environment for grasping, all of which are…
Continuum and soft robots can transform diverse sectors, including healthcare, agriculture, marine, and space, thanks to their potential to adaptively interact with unstructured environments. These robots exhibit complex mechanics that pose…
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…
Whole-arm tactile sensing enables a robot to sense contact and infer contact properties across its entire arm. Within this paper, we demonstrate that using data-driven methods, a humanoid robot can infer mechanical properties of objects…