Related papers: Grasping by Spiraling: Reproducing Elephant Moveme…
Realizing a soft manipulator with biologically comparable flexibility and versatility often requires careful selection of materials and actuation, as well as attentive design of its structure, perception, and control. Here, we report a new…
The elephant trunk exemplifies a natural gripper where structure, actuation, and sensing are seamlessly integrated. Inspired by the distal morphology of the African elephant trunk, we present MELEGROS, a Monolithic ELEphant-inspired GRipper…
Grasping has long been considered an important and practical task in robotic manipulation. Yet achieving robust and efficient grasps of diverse objects is challenging, since it involves gripper design, perception, control and learning, etc.…
This paper presents a soft robot finger capable of adaptive-twist deformation to grasp objects by wrapping them. For a soft hand to grasp and pick-up one object from densely contained multiple objects, a soft finger requires the…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Soft grippers are receiving growing attention due to their compliance-based interactive safety and dexterity. Hybrid gripper (soft actuators enhanced by rigid constraints) is a new trend in soft gripper design. With right structural…
Torque and continuous rotation are fundamental methods of actuation and manipulation in rigid robots. Soft robot arms use soft materials and structures to mimic the passive compliance of biological arms that bend and extend. This use of…
We consider in this article an Elephant Random Walk evolving in the plane. Specifically, this is a reinforced stochastic process in which the $n$th step is given by a random rotation of one of the previous steps chosen uniformly at random.…
The heavy-load legged robot has strong load carrying capacity and can adapt to various unstructured terrains. But the large weight results in higher requirements for motion stability and environmental perception ability. In order to utilize…
Spider monkeys (genus Ateles) have a prehensile tail that functions as a flexible, multipurpose fifth limb, enabling them to navigate complex terrains, grasp objects of various sizes, and swing between supports. Inspired by the spider…
Grasping is an essential capability for most robots in practical applications. Soft robotic grippers are considered as a critical part of robotic grasping and have attracted considerable attention in terms of the advantages of the high…
Grasping is the process of picking up an object by applying forces and torques at a set of contacts. Recent advances in deep-learning methods have allowed rapid progress in robotic object grasping. In this systematic review, we surveyed the…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
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,…
Sprawling locomotion in vertebrates, particularly salamanders, demonstrates how body undulation and spinal mobility enhance stability, maneuverability, and adaptability across complex terrains. While prior work has separately explored…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
This paper presents the application of a learning control approach for the realization of a fast and reliable pick-and-place application with a spherical soft robotic arm. The arm is characterized by a lightweight design and exhibits…
Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping…
Robots with multi-fingered grippers could perform advanced manipulation tasks for us if we were able to properly specify to them what to do. In this study, we take a step in that direction by making a robot grasp an object like a grasping…
One of the key problems in active materials is the control of shape through actuation. A fascinating example of such control is the elephant trunk, a long, muscular, and extremely dexterous organ with multiple vital functions. The elephant…