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Designing and fabricating structures with specific mechanical properties requires understanding the intricate relationship between design parameters and performance. Understanding the design-performance relationship becomes increasingly…

Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…

Estimating a soft robot's pose and applied forces, also called proprioception, is crucial for safe interaction of the robot with its environment. However, most solutions for soft robot proprioception use dedicated sensors, particularly for…

Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs) are a class of smart materials that exhibit a macroscopic contraction of up to 5% when heated via an electric current. This effect can be exploited for the development of novel unconventional actuators. Despite…

Long horizon sequential manipulation tasks are effectively addressed hierarchically: at a high level of abstraction the planner searches over abstract action sequences, and when a plan is found, lower level motion plans are generated. Such…

Soft actuators have drawn significant attention from researchers with an inherently compliant design to address the safety issues in physical human-robot interactions. However, they are also vulnerable and pose new challenges in the design,…

Dielectric elastomers are an emerging class of highly deformable electro-active materials employed for electromechanical transduction technology. For practical applications, the design of such transducers requires a model accounting for…

We present SoftSMPL, a learning-based method to model realistic soft-tissue dynamics as a function of body shape and motion. Datasets to learn such task are scarce and expensive to generate, which makes training models prone to overfitting.…

Highly automated assembly lines enable significant productivity gains in the manufacturing industry, particularly in mass production condition. Nonetheless, challenges persist in job scheduling for make-to-job and mass customization,…

Amorphous elastomers exhibit significant rate-stiffening and unique viscous flow characteristics across a wide range of strain rates, often undergoing glass transition above a strain rate threshold. We have developed a…

This paper investigates the influence of the internal geometrical structure of soft pneu-nets on the dynamic response and hysteresis of the actuators. The research findings indicate that by strategically manipulating the stress distribution…

Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning involves learning a \textit{dynamics model} from data, and then using this model to optimise behaviour, most often with an online \textit{planner}. Much of the recent research along these lines presents a…

Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…

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…

Mechanical metamaterials are artificially engineered microstructures that exhibit novel mechanical behavior on the macroscopic scale. Active metamaterials can be externally controlled. Pneumatically actuated metamaterials can change their…

We compute effective energies of thin bilayer structures composed by soft nematic elastic-liquid crystals in various geometrical regimes and functional configurations. Our focus is on order-strain interaction in elastic foundations composed…

The pace of soft material formulation (re)development and design is rapidly increasing as both consumers and new legislation demand products that do less harm to the environment while maintaining high standards of performance. To meet this…

Pneumatic soft robots are typically fabricated by molding, a manual fabrication process that requires skilled labor. Additive manufacturing has the potential to break this limitation and speed up the fabrication process but struggles with…

There is a growing need for soft robotic platforms that perform gentle, precise handling of a wide variety of objects. Existing surface-based manipulation systems, however, lack the compliance and tactile feedback needed for delicate…