Related papers: Soft Electrothermal Meta-Actuator for Robust Multi…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
There is increasing interest in control frameworks capable of moving robots from industrial cages to unstructured environments and coexisting with humans. Despite significant improvement in some specific applications (e.g., medical…
The speed of integrated circuits is ultimately limited by the mobility of electrons or holes, which depend on the effective mass in a semiconductor. Here, building on an analogy with electromagnetic metamaterials and transformation optics,…
Objective: In this work we address limitations in state-of-the-art ultrasound robots by designing and integrating a novel soft robotic system for ultrasound imaging. It employs the inherent qualities of soft fluidic actuators to establish…
How to macroscopically control the flow of heat at will is up to now a challenge, which, however, is very important for human life since heat flow is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. Inspired by intelligent electronic components or…
This paper presents a novel fabric-based thermal-haptic interface for virtual reality and teleoperation. It integrates pneumatic actuation and conductive fabric with an innovative ultra-lightweight design, achieving only 2~g for each finger…
The ability to design the control of heat flow has innumerable benefits in the design of electronic systems such as thermoelectric energy harvesters, solid-state lighting, and thermal imagers, where the thermal design plays a key role in…
We introduce the concept of metasurface spatial processor, whose transmission is remotely and coherently controlled by the superposition of an incident wave and a control wave through the metasurface. The conceptual operation of this device…
Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…
Future active metamaterials for reconfigurable structural applications require fast, untethered, reversible, and reprogrammable (multimodal) transformability with shape locking. Herein, we aim to construct and demonstrate a…
Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…
Wearable robots are limited by their actuators performances because they must bear the weight of their own power system and energy source. This paper explores the idea of leveraging hybrid modes to meet multiple operating points with a…
Soft and soft-rigid hybrid robots are inherently underactuated and operate under tight actuator limits, making task-space control with stability guarantees challenging. Common nonlinear strategies for soft robots (e.g., those based on PD…
Variable impedance actuators (VIAs) as tool devices for teleoperation could extend the range of tasks that humans can perform through a teleoperated robot by mimicking the change of upper limb stiffness that humans perform for different…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
In this paper, we introduce Haptic-Informed ACT, an advanced robotic system for pseudo oocyte manipulation, integrating multimodal information and Action Chunking with Transformers (ACT). Traditional automation methods for oocyte transfer…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
Soft robots can exhibit diverse behaviors with simple types of actuation by partially outsourcing control to the morphological and material properties of their soft bodies, which is made possible by the tight coupling between control, body,…
Track systems effectively distribute loads, augmenting traction and maneuverability on unstable terrains, leveraging their expansive contact areas. This tracked locomotion capability also aids in hand manipulation of not only regular…