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This paper presents a method for optimal motion planning of continuum robots by employing Bernstein surfaces to approximate the system's dynamics and impose complex constraints, including collision avoidance. The main contribution is the…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
Soft robots are gaining popularity thanks to their intrinsic safety to contacts and adaptability. However, the potentially infinite number of Degrees of Freedom makes their modeling a daunting task, and in many cases only an approximated…
Simulation modeling of robots, objects, and environments is the backbone for all model-based control and learning. It is leveraged broadly across dynamic programming and model-predictive control, as well as data generation for imitation,…
Contact modeling plays a central role in motion planning, simulation, and control of legged robots, as legged locomotion is realized through contact. The two prevailing approaches to model the contact consider rigid and compliant premise at…
Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…
The goal of this paper is to develop and analyze some fully discrete finite element methods for a displacement-pressure model modeling swelling dynamics of polymer gels under mechanical constraints. In the model, the swelling dynamics is…
Soft robot serial chain manipulators with the capability for growth, stiffness control, and discrete joints have the potential to approach the dexterity of traditional robot arms, while improving safety, lowering cost, and providing an…
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…
Robotics is shifting from rigid, articulated systems to more sophisticated and heterogeneous mechanical structures. Soft robots, for example, have continuously deformable elements capable of large deformations. The flourishing of control…
A three-dimensional simulation model is proposed here to study the erosive wear of structure caused by solid particles, which accounts for the accumulation of surface deformation and degradation during the erosion process. Although there…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
A flexible fiber model based on the discrete element method (DEM) is presented and validated for the simulation of uniaxial compression of flexible fibers in a cylindrical container. It is found that the contact force models in the DEM…
Recent research efforts have yielded significant advancements in manipulating objects under homogeneous settings where the robot is required to either manipulate rigid or deformable (soft) objects. However, the manipulation under…
Surgical robot simulation platform plays a crucial role in enhancing training efficiency and advancing research on robot learning. Much effort have been made by scholars on developing open-sourced surgical robot simulators to facilitate…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) have garnered extensive attention especially in soft robotic applications over the past few decades owing to the advantages of lightweight, large strain, fast response and high energy density. However,…
The robustness of a deep classifier can be characterized by its margins: the decision boundary's distances to natural data points. However, it is unclear whether existing robust training methods effectively increase the margin for each…
Thin bilayers made of elastic sheets with different strain recoveries can be used for dynamic shape morphing through ambient stimuli, such as temperature, mass diffusion, and light. As a fundamentally different approach to designing…
Locomotion on dynamic rigid surface (i.e., rigid surface accelerating in an inertial frame) presents complex challenges for controller design, which are essential for deploying humanoid robots in dynamic real-world environments such as…