Related papers: Bridging Hard and Soft: Mechanical Metamaterials E…

This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…

As soft robot design matures, researchers have converged to sophisticated design paradigms to enable the development of more suitable platforms. Two such paradigms are soft-rigid hybrid robots, which utilize rigid structural materials in…

Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance…

We propose a novel multi-section cable-driven soft robotic arm inspired by octopus tentacles along with a new modeling approach. Each section of the modular manipulator is made of a soft tubing backbone, a soft silicon arm body, and two…

Soft robotic hands and grippers are increasingly attracting attention as a robotic end-effector. Compared with rigid counterparts, they are safer for human-robot and environment-robot interactions, easier to control, lower cost and weight,…

Tip-extending soft robots that "grow" via pneumatic eversion of their body material have demonstrated applications in exploration of cluttered environments. During growth, the motion and force of the robot tip can be controlled in three…

Assistive robotic arms enable users with physical disabilities to perform everyday tasks without relying on a caregiver. Unfortunately, the very dexterity that makes these arms useful also makes them challenging to teleoperate: the robot…

This paper delineates the formulation and verification of an innovative robotic forearm and elbow design, mirroring the intricate biomechanics of human skeletal and ligament systems. Conventional robotic models often undervalue the…

Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…

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…

One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…

Spider monkeys (genus Ateles) have a prehensile tail that functions as a flexible, multipurpose fifth limb, enabling them to navigate complex terrains, grasp objects of various sizes, and swing between supports. Inspired by the spider…

The deployment of complex soft robots in multiphysics environments requires advanced simulation frameworks that not only capture interactions between different types of material, but also translate accurately to real-world performance. Soft…

Soft grippers are receiving growing attention due to their compliance-based interactive safety and dexterity. Hybrid gripper (soft actuators enhanced by rigid constraints) is a new trend in soft gripper design. With right structural…

Mechanical metamaterials are artificial structures with unusual properties, such as negative Poisson ratio, bistability or tunable vibrational properties, that originate in the geometry of their unit cell. At the heart of such unusual…

Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…

Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…

Biped robots usually adopt feet with a rigid structure that simplifies walking on flat grounds and yet hinders ground adaptation in unstructured environments, thus jeopardizing stability. We recently explored in the SoftFoot the idea of…

Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…

Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…