Related papers: Topology-Inspired Morphological Descriptor for Sof…
The morphology of a slender soft-robot can be modified by sensing its shape via sensors and exerting moments via actuators embedded along its body. The actuating moments required to morph these soft-robots to a desired shape are often…
Locomotive soft robots (SoRos) have gained prominence due to their adaptability. Traditional locomotive SoRo design is based on limb structures inspired by biological organisms and requires human intervention. Evolutionary robotics,…
The Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) model is the most widely used soft robotic modeling and control. However, the PCC fails to accurately describe the deformation of the soft robots when executing dynamic tasks or interacting with the…
Robot appearance crucially shapes Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) but is typically described via broad categories like anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, or technical. More precise approaches focus almost exclusively on anthropomorphic features,…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
In this extended abstract, we report on ongoing work towards an approximate multimodal optimization algorithm with asymptotic guarantees. Multimodal optimization is the problem of finding all local optimal solutions (modes) to a path…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…
Imagine a swarm of terrestrial robots that can explore an environment, and, upon completion of this task, reconfigure into a spherical ball and roll out. This dimensional change alters the dynamics of locomotion and can assist them to…
Accurate delineation of fine-scale structures is a very important yet challenging problem. Existing methods use topological information as an additional training loss, but are ultimately making pixel-wise predictions. In this paper, we…
Flexible sensors are increasingly employed in soft robotics and wearable devices to provide proprioception of freeform deformations.Although supervised learning can train shape predictors from sensor signals, prediction accuracy strongly…
Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example…
We present a method for differentiable simulation of soft articulated bodies. Our work enables the integration of differentiable physical dynamics into gradient-based pipelines. We develop a top-down matrix assembly algorithm within…
We introduce a robust control architecture for the whole-body motion control of torque controlled robots with arms and legs. The method is based on the robust control of contact forces in order to track a planned Center of Mass trajectory.…
As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
Quantifying the correlation between the complex structures of amorphous materials and their physical properties has been a long-standing problem in materials science. In amorphous Si, a representative covalent amorphous solid, the presence…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
While soft robot manipulators offer compelling advantages over rigid counterparts, including inherent compliance, safe human-robot interaction, and the ability to conform to complex geometries, accurate forward modeling from low-dimensional…
Shape control of deformable objects is a challenging and important robotic problem. This paper proposes a model-free controller using novel 3D global deformation features based on modal analysis. Unlike most existing controllers using…
When humans perform contact-rich manipulation tasks, customized tools are often necessary to simplify the task. For instance, we use various utensils for handling food, such as knives, forks and spoons. Similarly, robots may benefit from…