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Visually-guided underwater robots are deployed alongside human divers for cooperative exploration, inspection, and monitoring tasks in numerous shallow-water and coastal-water applications. The most essential capability of such companion…
A deformable land-air robot is introduced with excellent driving and flying capabilities, offering a smooth switching mechanism between the two modes. An elaborate coupled dynamics model is established for the robot, including rotors,…
Soft robots are powerful tools for manipulating delicate objects, yet their adoption is hindered by two gaps: the lack of integrated tactile sensing and sensor signal distortion caused by actuator deformations. This paper addresses these…
Sliding tasks performed by aerial robots are valuable for inspection and simple maintenance tasks at height, such as non-destructive testing and painting. Although various end-effector designs have been used for such tasks, non-actuated…
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation…
Soft-growing robots (i.e., vine robots) are a promising class of soft robots that allow for navigation and growth in tightly confined environments. However, these robots remain challenging to model and control due to the complex interplay…
Soft microrobots based on photoresponsive materials and controlled by light fields can generate a variety of different gaits. This inherent flexibility can be exploited to maximize their locomotion performance in a given environment and…
Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…
We achieved contact-rich flexible object manipulation, which was difficult to control with vision alone. In the unzipping task we chose as a validation task, the gripper grasps the puller, which hides the bag state such as the direction and…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
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…
The vision of creating entirely-soft robots capable of performing complex tasks will be accomplished only when the controllers required for autonomous operation can be fully implemented on soft components. Despite recent advances in…
Visual Odometry (VO) and Visual SLAM (V-SLAM) systems often struggle in low-light and dark environments due to the lack of robust visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel active illumination framework to enhance the performance of…
This paper presents the design and development of a highly articulated, continuum, wearable, fabric-based Soft Poly-Limb (fSPL). This fabric soft arm acts as an additional limb that provides the wearer with mobile manipulation assistance…
An accurate, physically-based, and differentiable model of soft robots can unlock downstream applications in optimal control. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is an expressive approach for modeling highly deformable structures such as…
Modular soft robots combine the strengths of two traditionally separate areas of robotics. As modular robots, they can show robustness to individual failure and reconfigurability; as soft robots, they can deform and undergo large shape…
Soft mobile robots have emerged as a promising area of research with potential applications in various disciplines including but not limited to search-and-rescue, service, surveillance, explorations, and manufacturing. In this article, we…
Passivity is necessary for robots to fluidly collaborate and interact with humans physically. Nevertheless, due to the unconstrained nature of passivity-based impedance control laws, the robot is vulnerable to infeasible and unsafe…
Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…
The complex behavior of highly deformable mechanical metamaterials can substantially enhance the performance of soft robots.