Related papers: Topology-Inspired Morphological Descriptor for Sof…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…
Soft robotics focuses on designing robots with highly deformable materials, allowing them to adapt and operate safely and reliably in unstructured and variable environments. While soft robots offer increased compliance over rigid body…
Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots (TDCRs) have the potential to be used in minimally invasive surgery and industrial inspection, where the robot must enter narrow and confined spaces. We propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach to…
We develop an optimization-based algorithm for parametric model order reduction (PMOR) of linear time-invariant dynamical systems. Our method aims at minimizing the $\mathcal{H}_\infty \otimes \mathcal{L}_\infty$ approximation error in the…
As soft robot design matures, researchers have converged to sophisticated design paradigms to enable the development of more suitable platforms. Two such paradigms are soft-rigid hybrid robots, which utilize rigid structural materials in…
Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…
Soft prompt tuning leverages continuous embeddings to capture task-specific information in large pre-trained language models (LLMs), achieving competitive performance in few-shot settings. However, soft prompts rely on high-dimensional,…
Continuum robots have emerged as a promising technology in the medical field due to their potential of accessing deep sited locations of the human body with low surgical trauma. When deriving physics-based models for these robots,…
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a…
We propose a new model-order reduction framework to poorly reducible problems arising from parametric partial differential equations with geometric variability. In such problems, the solution manifold exhibits a slowly decaying Kolmogorov…
State estimation is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. For soft continuum robots, this task is particularly challenging because their states (poses, strains, internal wrenches, and velocities) are inherently infinite-dimensional…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
This paper presents a data-efficient approach to learning transferable forward models for robotic push manipulation. Our approach extends our previous work on contact-based predictors by leveraging information on the pushed object's local…
Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
We propose reaching steps towards the real-time strain control of multiphysics, multiscale continuum soft robots. To study this problem fundamentally, we ground ourselves in a model-based control setting enabled by mathematically precise…
Controlling structural complexity, particularly the number of holes, remains a fundamental challenge in topology optimization, with significant implications for both theoretical analysis and manufacturability. Most existing approaches rely…
Multi-robot motion planning problems often have many local minima. It is essential to visualize those local minima such that we can better understand, debug and interact with multi-robot systems. Towards this goal, we present the…
Existing approaches for visuomotor robotic control typically require characterizing the robot in advance by calibrating the camera or performing system identification. We propose MAVRIC, an approach that works with minimal prior knowledge…
The co-design of robot morphology and neural control typically requires using reinforcement learning to approximate a unique control policy gradient for each body plan, demanding massive amounts of training data to measure the performance…