Related papers: Feedback Regulated Opto-Mechanical Soft Robotic Ac…
This paper explores the concept of reflexive actuation, examining how robots may leverage both internal and external stimuli to trigger changes in the motion, performance, or physical characteristics of the robot, such as its size, shape,…
The macroscopic behaviour of active matter arises from nonequilibrium microscopic processes. In soft materials, active stresses typically drive macroscopic shape changes, which in turn alter the geometry constraining the microscopic…
Smart structures are usually designed with a stimulus-response mechanism to mimic the autoregulatory process of living systems. In this work, in order to simulate this natural and self-adjustable behavior, a fuzzy feedback linearization…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
The design of amorphous entangled systems, specifically from soft and active materials, has the potential to open exciting new classes of active, shape-shifting, and task-capable 'smart' materials. However, the global emergent mechanics…
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…
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…
Feedback optimization has emerged as a promising approach for regulating dynamical systems to optimal steady states that are implicitly defined by underlying optimization problems. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods face two key…
Soft actuators are receiving increasing attention from the engineering community, not only in research but even for industrial applications. Among soft actuators, fibre-reinforced Bending Fluidic Actuators (BFAs) became very popular thanks…
In this paper, we present a general learning-based framework to automatically visual-servo control the position and shape of a deformable object with unknown deformation parameters. The servo-control is accomplished by learning a feedback…
We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…
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…
Robots operating in unstructured environments face significant challenges when interacting with everyday objects like doors. They particularly struggle to generalize across diverse door types and conditions. Existing vision-based and…
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…
Motion planning failures during autonomous navigation often occur when safety constraints are either too conservative, leading to deadlocks, or too liberal, resulting in collisions. To improve robustness, a robot must dynamically adapt its…
The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…
Soft microrobots based on photoresponsive materials and controlled by light fields can generate a variety of different gaits. This inherent flexibility can be exploited to maximize their locomotion performance in a given environment and…
The fast-slow dynamics of an eco-evolutionary system are studied, where we consider the feedback actions of environmental resources that are classified into those that are self-renewing and those externally supplied. We show although these…
A system consisting of a doubly clamped beam with an attached body (slider) free to move along the beam has been studied recently by multiple research groups. Under harmonic base excitation, the system has the capacity to passively adapt…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…