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Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…
Snapping instabilities in soft structures offer a powerful pathway to achieve rapid and energy-efficient actuation. In this study, an eccentric dome-shaped snapping actuator is developed to generate controllable asymmetric motion through…
A flexible membrane deforming its shape in time can self-propel in a viscous fluid. Alternatively, if the membrane is anchored, its deformation will lead to fluid transport. Past work in this area focused on situations where the deformation…
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…
This paper presents a systematic topology optimization framework for designing a soft pneumatic gripper (SPG), explicitly considering the design-dependent nature of the actuating load. The load is modeled using Darcy's law with an added…
Non-prehensile planar manipulation, including pushing and press-and-slide, is critical for diverse robotic tasks, but notoriously challenging due to hybrid contact mechanics, under-actuation, and asymmetric friction limits that…
Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…
Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…
We investigate pneumatic non-prehensile manipulation (i.e., blowing) as a means of efficiently moving scattered objects into a target receptacle. Due to the chaotic nature of aerodynamic forces, a blowing controller must (i) continually…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
Artificial neural networks accurately learn nonlinear, path-dependent material behavior. However, training them typically requires large, diverse datasets, often created via synthetic unit cell simulations. This hinders practical adoption…
Constitutive models that describe the mechanical behavior of soft tissues have advanced greatly over the past few decades. These expert models are generalizable and require the calibration of a number of parameters to fit experimental data.…
Biological agents possess bodies that are mostly of soft tissues. Researchers have resorted to soft bodies to investigate Artificial Life (ALife)-related questions; similarly, a new era of soft-bodied robots has just begun. Nevertheless,…
We present a microscopic model of a disordered viscoelastic active solid, i.e. an active material whose long time behaviour is elastic as opposed to viscous. It is composed of filaments, passive crosslinks and molecular motors powered by…
Liquid crystal elastomers contract along their director on heating and recover on cooling, offering great potential as actuators and artificial muscles. If a flat sheet is programmed with a spatially varying director pattern, it will…
Topological plasmonics offers new ways to manipulate light by combining concepts from topology and plasmonics, similar to topological edge states in photonics. However, designing such topological states remains challenging due to the…
Soft materials such as rubber and hydrogels are commonly used in industry for their excellent hyperelastic behaviour. There are various types of constitutive models for soft materials, and phenomenological models are very popular for finite…
This study tackles the representative yet challenging contact-rich peg-in-hole task of robotic assembly, using a soft wrist that can operate more safely and tolerate lower-frequency control signals than a rigid one. Previous studies often…
Inspired by the dexterous handling ability of an elephant's trunk, we propose a pneumatic actuator that generates diverse bending and extension motions in a flexible arm. The actuator consists of two flexible tubes. Each flexible tube is…
We present a data-driven framework for the multiscale modeling of anisotropic finite strain elasticity based on physics-augmented neural networks (PANNs). Our approach allows the efficient simulation of materials with complex underlying…