Related papers: Embodied multi-modal sensing with a soft modular a…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
This paper proposes a soft sensor embedded in a soft ring actuator with five fingers as a soft hand to identify the bifurcation of manipulated objects during the in-hand manipulation process. The manipulation is performed by breaking the…
Modeling deformable objects - especially continuum materials - in a way that is physically plausible, generalizable, and data-efficient remains challenging across 3D vision, graphics, and robotic manipulation. Many existing methods…
Soft robots have immense potential given their inherent safety and adaptability, but challenges in soft actuator forces and design constraints have limited scaling up soft robots to larger sizes. Electrothermal shape memory alloy (SMA)…
Soft robots have struggled to support large forces and moments while also supporting their own weight against gravity. This limits their ability to reach certain configurations necessary for tasks such as inspection and pushing objects up.…
Growing robots based on the eversion principle are known for their ability to extend rapidly, from within, along their longitudinal axis, and, in doing so, reach deep into hitherto inaccessible, remote spaces. Despite many advantages,…
The human brain's plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm…
We present an embodied AI system which receives open-ended natural language instructions from a human, and controls two arms to collaboratively accomplish potentially long-horizon tasks over a large workspace. Our system is modular: it…
Soft robots promise improved safety and capability over rigid robots when deployed in complex, delicate, and dynamic environments. However, the infinite degrees of freedom and highly nonlinear dynamics of these systems severely complicate…
Non-contact laser ablation, a precise thermal technique, simultaneously cuts and coagulates tissue without the insertion errors associated with rigid needles. Human organ motions, such as those in the liver, exhibit rhythmic components…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
Swarm robotics is envisioned to automate a large number of dirty, dangerous, and dull tasks. Robots have limited energy, computation capability, and communication resources. Therefore, current swarm robotics have a small number of robots,…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects. Adoption…
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…
The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
A novel semi-analytical method is proposed to develop the pseudo-rigid-body~(PRB) model of robots made of highly flexible members (HFM), such as flexures and continuum robots, with no limit on the degrees of freedom of the PRB model. The…
In the manufacturing process, sensor data collected from equipment is crucial for building predictive models to manage processes and improve productivity. However, in the field, it is challenging to gather sufficient data to build robust…
This paper presents a novel soft robotic system for a deformable mannequin that can be employed to physically realize the 3D geometry of different human bodies. The soft membrane on a mannequin is deformed by inflating several curved…
We propose reaching steps towards the real-time strain control of multiphysics, multiscale continuum soft robots. To study this problem fundamentally, we ground ourselves in a model-based control setting enabled by mathematically precise…