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The human hand has an inherent ability to manipulate and re-orientate objects without external assistance. As a consequence, we are able to operate tools and perform an array of actions using just one hand, without having to continuously…
Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings. In this…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Heavy-duty operations, typically performed using heavy-duty hydraulic manipulators (HHMs), are susceptible to environmental contact due to tracking errors or sudden environmental changes. Therefore, beyond precise control design, it is…
A key challenge in robotics is to create efficient methods for grasping objects with diverse shapes, sizes, poses, and properties. Grasping with hand-like end effectors often requires careful selection of hand orientation and finger…
It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training,…
Numerous soft actuators based on PneuNet design have already been proposed and extensively employed across various soft robotics applications in recent years. Despite their widespread use, a common limitation of most existing designs is…
Soft robots have become increasingly popular for complex manipulation tasks requiring gentle and safe contact. However, their softness makes accurate control challenging, and high-fidelity sensing is a prerequisite to adequate control…
Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…
Biomimetic entirely soft robots with animal-like behavior and integrated artificial nervous systems will open up totally new perspectives and applications. However, until now all presented studies on soft robots were limited to partly soft…
A long-standing engineering problem, the control of soft robots is difficult because of their highly non-linear, heterogeneous, anisotropic, and distributed nature. Here, bridging engineering and biology, a neural reservoir is employed for…
The field of bio-inspired robotics seeks to create mechanical systems that mimic the designs and concepts used by biological systems. One of the more challenging biological concepts to imitate in mechanical systems is the ability to create…
Soft pneumatic actuators enable safe human-machine interaction with lightweight and powerful applied parts. On the other side, they suffer design limitations as regards complex actuation patterns, including minimum bending radii,…
This paper addresses the challenge of human-guided navigation for mobile collaborative robots under simultaneous proximity regulation and safety constraints. We introduce Adaptive Reinforcement and Model Predictive Control Switching (ARMS),…
Soft robotics leverages deformable materials to develop robots capable of navigating unstructured and dynamic environments. Silicone Voxel-Based Soft Robots (Silibots) are a type of pneumatically actuated soft robots that rely on the…
Soft machines are poised to deliver significant real-world impact, with soft robotics emerging as a key sub-discipline. This field integrates biological inspiration, materials science, and embodied intelligence to create bio-robotic…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…
In this work, an experimental characterization of the configuration space of a soft, pneumatically actuated morphing quadrotor is presented, with a focus on precise thrust characterization of its flexible arms, considering the effect of…