Related papers: Safe Autonomous Environmental Contact for Soft Rob…
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…
Safe operation is essential for deploying robots in human-centered 3D environments. Soft continuum manipulators provide passive safety through mechanical compliance, but still require active control to achieve reliable collision avoidance.…
The design process and complexity of existing safety controls are heavily determined by the geometrical properties of the environment, which affects the proof of convergence, design scalability, performance robustness, and numerical…
Robots often face manipulation tasks in environments where vision is inadequate due to clutter, occlusions, or poor lighting--for example, reaching a shutoff valve at the back of a sink cabinet or locating a light switch above a crowded…
With soft robotics being increasingly employed in settings demanding high and controlled contact forces, recent research has demonstrated the use of soft robots to estimate or intrinsically sense forces without requiring external sensing…
We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…
In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…
Soft modular robots enable more flexibility and safer interaction with the changing environment than traditional robots. However, it has remained challenging to create deformable connectors that can be integrated into soft machines. In this…
This paper presents a robot control algorithm suitable for safe reactive navigation tasks in cluttered environments. The proposed approach consists of transforming the robot workspace into the \emph{ball world}, an artificial representation…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Soft robotics is an emerging technology in which engineers create flexible devices for use in a variety of applications. In order to advance the wide adoption of soft robots, ensuring their trustworthiness is essential; if soft robots are…
With robots leaving factories and entering less controlled domains, possibly sharing the space with humans, safety is paramount and multimodal awareness of the body surface and the surrounding environment is fundamental. Taking inspiration…
Soft robotics is an emerging field of research where the robot body is composed of compliant and soft materials. It allows the body to bend, twist, and deform to move or to adapt its shape to the environment for grasping, all of which are…
Humanoid robots locomote by making and breaking contacts with their environment. A crucial problem is therefore to find precise criteria for a given contact to remain stable or to break. For rigid surface contacts, the most general…
Force control enables hands-on teaching and physical collaboration, with the potential to improve ergonomics and flexibility of automation. Established methods for the design of compliance, impedance control, and \rev{collision response}…
What is considered safe for a robot operator during physical human-robot collaboration (HRC) is specified in corresponding HRC standards (e.g., ISO/TS 15066). The regime that allows collisions between the moving robot and the operator,…
Deformable robots are notoriously difficult to model or control due to its high-dimensional configuration spaces. Direct trajectory optimization suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality and incurs a high computational cost, while…
The new industrial settings are characterized by the presence of human and robots that work in close proximity, cooperating in performing the required job. Such a collaboration, however, requires to pay attention to many aspects. Firstly,…