Related papers: Safe Autonomous Environmental Contact for Soft Rob…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…
In this paper, we focus on non-conservative collision avoidance between robots and obstacles with control affine dynamics and convex shapes. System safety is defined using the minimum distance between the safe regions associated with robots…
Mechanical compliance is a key design parameter for dynamic contact-rich manipulation, affecting task success and safety robustness over contact geometry variation. Design of soft robotic structures, such as compliant fingers, requires…
Safety in human-robot interaction can be divided into physical safety and perceived safety, where the latter is still under-addressed in the literature. Investigating perceived safety in human-robot interaction requires a multidisciplinary…
This paper presents a comprehensive approach for the safety-critical control of robotic manipulators operating in dynamic environments. Building upon the framework of Control Barrier Functions (CBFs), we extend the collision cone…
The last half-decade has seen a steep rise in the number of contributions on safe learning methods for real-world robotic deployments from both the control and reinforcement learning communities. This article provides a concise but holistic…
Artificial electronic skins covering complete robot bodies can make physical human-robot collaboration safe and hence possible. Standards for collaborative robots (e.g., ISO/TS 15066) prescribe permissible forces and pressures during…
Direct physical interaction with robots is becoming increasingly important in flexible production scenarios, but robots without protective fences also pose a greater risk to the operator. In order to keep the risk potential low, relatively…
Force and proximity sensors are key in robotics, especially when applied in collaborative robots that interact physically or cognitively with humans in real unstructured environments. However, most existing sensors for use in robotics are…
Aerial manipulation for safe physical interaction with their environments is gaining significant momentum in robotics research. In this paper, we present a disturbance-observer-based safety-critical control for a fully actuated aerial…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
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…
Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…
As of today, robots exhibit impressive agility but also pose potential hazards to humans using/collaborating with them. Consequently, safety is considered the most paramount factor in human-robot interaction (HRI). This paper presents a…
Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new…
Finite element methods have been successfully used to develop physics-based models of soft robots that capture the nonlinear dynamic behavior induced by continuous deformation. These high-fidelity models are therefore ideal for designing…
Soft robotics has emerged as a transformative technology in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations, addressing challenges in navigating complex, hazardous environments that often limit traditional rigid robots. This paper critically examines…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
An underdeveloped capability in soft robotics is proprioceptive feedback control, where soft actuators can be sensed and controlled using only sensors on the robot's body. Additionally, soft actuators are often unable to support human-scale…