Related papers: Topology-Inspired Morphological Descriptor for Sof…
Evolving virtual creatures is a field with a rich history and recently it has been getting more attention, especially in the soft robotics domain. The compliance of soft materials endows soft robots with complex behavior, but it also makes…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…
Understanding the global dynamics of a robot controller, such as identifying attractors and their regions of attraction (RoA), is important for safe deployment and synthesizing more effective hybrid controllers. This paper proposes a…
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…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing…
A novel semi-analytical method is proposed to develop the pseudo-rigid-body~(PRB) model of robots made of highly flexible members (HFM), such as flexures and continuum robots, with no limit on the degrees of freedom of the PRB model. The…
Humans and animals are capable of quickly learning new behaviours to solve new tasks. Yet, we often forget that they also rely on a highly specialized morphology that co-adapted with motor control throughout thousands of years. Although…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Soft robotics holds transformative potential for enabling adaptive and adaptable systems in dynamic environments. However, the interplay between morphological and control complexities and their collective impact on task performance remains…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Tendon-driven continuum robots offer intrinsically safe and contact-rich interactions owing to their kinematic redundancy and structural compliance. However, their perception often depends on external sensors, which increase hardware…
Soft robotics has advanced rapidly, yet its control methods remain fragmented: different morphologies and actuation schemes still require task-specific controllers, hindering theoretical integration and large-scale deployment. A generic…
Soft continuum robots can allow for biocompatible yet compliant motions, such as the ability of octopus arms to swim, crawl, and manipulate objects. However, current state-of-the-art continuum robots can only achieve real-time task-space…
Soft robots have proven to outperform traditional robots in applications related to propagation in geometrically constrained environments. Designing these robots and their controllers is an intricate task, since their building materials…
This paper addresses the challenge of co-designing morphology and control in soft robots via a novel neural network evolution approach. We propose an innovative method to implicitly dual-encode soft robots, thus facilitating the…
This article takes a step to provide humanoid robots with adaptive morphology abilities. We present a systematic approach for enabling robotic covers to morph their shape, with an overall size fitting the anthropometric dimensions of a…
We present a comprehensive framework for studying and leveraging morphological symmetries in robotic systems. These are intrinsic properties of the robot's morphology, frequently observed in animal biology and robotics, which stem from the…
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…