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Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Both the design and control of a robot play equally important roles in its task performance. However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Navigating mobile robots through environments shared with humans is challenging. From the perspective of the robot, humans are dynamic obstacles that must be avoided. These obstacles make the collision-free space nonconvex, which leads to…
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…
The ocean vast unexplored regions and diverse soft-bodied marine organisms have spurred interest in bio-inspired underwater soft robotics. Recent advances have enabled new capabilities in underwater movement, sensing, and interaction.…
This paper presents a novel vision-based proprioception approach for a soft robotic finger that can estimate and reconstruct tactile interactions in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The key to this system lies in the finger's…
We present a comprehensive study on discrete morphological symmetries of dynamical systems, which are commonly observed in biological and artificial locomoting systems, such as legged, swimming, and flying animals/robots/virtual characters.…
In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as…
Fast, collision-free motion through unknown environments remains a challenging problem for robotic systems. In these situations, the robot's ability to reason about its future motion is often severely limited by sensor field of view (FOV).…
Soft robots, particularly magnetic soft robots, require specialized simulation tools to accurately model their deformation under external magnetic fields. However, existing platforms often lack dedicated support for magnetic materials,…
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…
Multi-legged elongate robots hold promise for maneuvering through complex environments. Prior work has demonstrated that reliable locomotion can be achieved using open-loop body undulation and foot placement on rugose terrain. However,…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
In everyday life collaboration tasks between human operators and robots, the former necessitate simple ways for programming new skills, the latter have to show adaptive capabilities to cope with environmental changes. The joint use of…
In order to manipulate a deformable object, such as rope or cloth, in unstructured environments, robots need a way to estimate its current shape. However, tracking the shape of a deformable object can be challenging because of the object's…