Related papers: Embodied multi-modal sensing with a soft modular a…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
We propose a hardware and software pipeline to fabricate flexible wearable sensors and use them to capture deformations without line of sight. Our first contribution is a low-cost fabrication pipeline to embed multiple aligned conductive…
This paper is concerned with the problem of estimating (interpolating and smoothing) the shape (pose and the six modes of deformation) of a slender flexible body from multiple camera measurements. This problem is important in both biology,…
Soft-robot designs are manifold, but only a few are publicly available. Often, these are only briefly described in their publications. This complicates reproduction, and hinders the reproducibility and comparability of research results. If…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
The compliance of soft robotic arms renders the development of accurate kinematic & dynamical models especially challenging. The most widely used model in soft robotic kinematics assumes Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC). However, PCC…
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…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
Soft robots offer significant advantages in safety and adaptability, yet achieving precise and dynamic control remains a major challenge due to their inherently complex and nonlinear dynamics. Recently, Data-enabled Predictive Control…
Recent studies have demonstrated the immense potential of exploiting muscle actuator morphology for natural and robust movement -- in simulation. A validation on real robotic hardware is yet missing. In this study, we emulate muscle…
Adaptation to external and internal changes is major for robotic systems in uncertain environments. Here we present a novel multisensory active inference torque controller for industrial arms that shows how prediction can be used to resolve…
Controlling soft continuum robotic arms is challenging due to their hyper-redundancy and dexterity. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop control of the configuration space variables of a soft robotic arm, composed…
Modular soft robots have shown higher potential in sophisticated tasks than single-module robots. However, the modular structure incurs the complexity of accurate control and necessitates a control strategy specifically for modular robots.…
Soft materials are not only highly deformable but they also possess rich and diverse body dynamics. Soft body dynamics exhibit a variety of properties, including nonlinearity, elasticity, and potentially infinitely many degrees of freedom.…
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…
The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…