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Tactile sensing is of great importance during human hand usage such as object exploration, grasping and manipulation. Different types of tactile sensors have been designed during the past decades, which are mainly focused on either the…
Shape-morphing robots have shown benefits in industrial grasping. We propose form-flexible grippers for adaptive grasping. The design is based on the hybrid jamming and suction mechanism, which deforms to handle objects that vary…
Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be…
Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…
Soft pneumatic gripping strategies are often based on pressurized actuation of structures made of soft elastomeric materials, which limits designs in terms of size, weight, achievable forces, and ease of fabrication. On the other hand,…
Soft robotics is attractive for wearable applications that require conformal interactions with the human body. Soft wearable robotic garments hold promise for supplying dynamic compression or massage therapies, such as are applied for…
In this work, we present a reconfigurable data glove design to capture different modes of human hand-object interactions, which are critical in training embodied artificial intelligence (AI) agents for fine manipulation tasks. To achieve…
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…
Tendon-driven underactuated hands excel in adaptive grasping but often suffer from kinematic unpredictability and highly non-linear force transmission. This ambiguity limits their ability to perform precise free-motion shaping and deliver…
In this paper we explore state-of-the-art underactuated, compliant robot gripper designs through looking at their performance on a generic grasping task. Starting from a state of the art open gripper design, we propose design…
This paper presents the design, control, and applications of a multi-segment soft robotic arm. In order to design a soft arm with large load capacity, several design principles are proposed by analyzing two kinds of buckling issues, under…
This paper presents a shear-based control scheme for grasping and manipulating delicate objects with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with soft biomimetic tactile sensors on all five fingertips. These `microTac' tactile sensors…
It is challenging to grasp numerous objects with varying sizes and shapes with a single robot hand. To address this, we propose a new robot hand called the 'F3 hand' inspired by the complex movements of human index finger and thumb. The F3…
Precise in-hand manipulation of force-sensitive objects typically requires judicious coordinated force planning as well as accurate contact force feedback and control. Unlike multi-arm platforms with gripper end effectors, multi-fingered…
In recent years, advancements in optical tactile sensor technology have primarily centred on enhancing sensing precision and expanding the range of sensing modalities. To meet the requirements for more skilful manipulation, there should be…
Tactile sensing can provide access to information about the contact (i.e. slippage, surface feature, friction), which is out of reach of vision but crucial for manipulation. To access this information, a dense measurement of the deformation…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
Granular jamming has recently become popular in soft robotics with widespread applications including industrial gripping, surgical robotics and haptics. Previous work has investigated the use of various techniques that exploit the nature of…
Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…
Practical use of robotic manipulators made from soft materials requires generating and executing complex motions. We present the first approach for generating trajectories of a thermally-actuated soft robotic manipulator. Based on…