Related papers: Soft yet Effective Robots via Holistic Co-Design
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…
AI technologies, including deep learning, large-language models have gone from one breakthrough to the other. As a result, we are witnessing growing excitement in robotics at the prospect of leveraging the potential of AI to tackle some of…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects. Adoption…
Developing soft circuits from individual soft logic gates poses a unique challenge: with increasing numbers of logic gates, the design and implementation of circuits leads to inefficiencies due to mathematically unoptimized circuits and…
The Industry 4.0 paradigm emphasizes the crucial benefits that collaborative robots, i.e., robots able to work alongside and together with humans, could bring to the whole production process. In this context, an enabling technology yet…
Soft robots offer adaptability and safe interaction with complex environments. Rapid prototyping kits that allow soft robots to be assembled easily will allow different geometries to be explored quickly to suit different environments or to…
The design and fabrication of soft robot hands is still a time-consuming and difficult process. Advances in rapid prototyping have accelerated the fabrication process significantly while introducing new complexities into the design process.…
Researchers traditionally solve the computational problems through rigorous and deterministic algorithms called as Hard Computing. These precise algorithms have widely been realized using digital technology as an inherently reliable and…
AI-based design tools are proliferating in professional software to assist engineering and industrial designers in complex manufacturing and design tasks. These tools take on more agentic roles than traditional computer-aided design tools…
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…
Modular robots have the potential to revolutionize automation, as one can optimize their composition for any given task. However, finding optimal compositions is non-trivial. In addition, different compositions require different base…
The co-adaptation of robots has been a long-standing research endeavour with the goal of adapting both body and behaviour of a system for a given task, inspired by the natural evolution of animals. Co-adaptation has the potential to…
Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…
Industrial human-robot collaborative systems must be validated thoroughly with regard to safety. The sooner potential hazards for workers can be exposed, the less costly is the implementation of necessary changes. Due to the complexity of…
Human computer interaction is shifting from screen-based systems to multimodal interfaces where artificial intelligence powered systems increasingly interpret user intent through speech, gesture, and gaze. Yet users rarely understand how…
Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…
Design requirements for moving parts in mechanical assemblies are typically specified in terms of interactions with other parts. Some are purely kinematic (e.g., pairwise collision avoidance) while others depend on physics and material…
Cooperation and collaboration robots, co-robots or cobots for short, are an integral part of factories. For example, they work closely with the fitters in the automotive sector, and everyone does what they do best. However, the novel robots…
Studies of human-robot interaction in dynamic and unstructured environments show that as more advanced robotic capabilities are deployed, the need for cooperative competencies to support collaboration with human problem-holders increases.…