Related papers: Exploring Stiffness Gradient Effects in Magnetical…
This paper addresses the problem of controlling a continuum manipulator (CM) in free or obstructed environments with no prior knowledge about the deformation behavior of the CM and the stiffness and geometry of the interacting obstructed…
Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a…
Modular Active Cell Robots (MACROs) are a design paradigm for modular robotic hardware that uses only two components, namely actuators and passive compliant joints. Under the MACRO approach, a large number of actuators and joints are…
Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have become central to computational pathology, aiming to offer general encoders for feature extraction from whole-slide images (WSIs). Despite strong benchmark performance, PFM robustness to real-world…
Shape-morphing structures possess the ability to change their shapes from one state to another, and therefore, offer great potential for a broad range of applications. A typical paradigm of morphing is transforming from an initial…
An important challenge in robotics is understanding the interactions between robots and deformable terrains that consist of granular material. Granular flows and their interactions with rigid bodies still pose several open questions. A…
By learning Variable Impedance Control policy, robot assistants can intelligently adapt their manipulation compliance to ensure both safe interaction and proper task completion when operating in human-robot interaction environments. In this…
Inflated-beam soft robots, such as tip-everting vine robots, can control curvature by contracting one beam side via pneumatic actuation. This work develops a general finite element modeling approach to characterize their bending. The model…
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…
This study examines the mechanical behavior of a novel class of mechanical metamaterials alternating pentamode lattices and stiffening plates. The unit cell of such lattices consists of a sub-lattice of the face cubic-centered unit cell…
Fluidically actuated soft robots have promising capabilities such as inherent compliance and user safety. The control of soft robots needs to properly handle nonlinear actuation dynamics, motion constraints, workspace limitations, and…
Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and…
Soft robots are inherently compliant and have a strong potential to realize human-friendly and safe robots. Despite continued research highlighting the potential of soft robots, they remain largely confined to laboratory settings. In this…
Organisms in nature, such as Cephalopods and Pachyderms, exploit stiffness modulation to achieve amazing dexterity in the control of their appendages. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of layer jamming, which is a popular stiffness…
Continuum and soft robots can transform diverse sectors, including healthcare, agriculture, marine, and space, thanks to their potential to adaptively interact with unstructured environments. These robots exhibit complex mechanics that pose…
Compliance is a strong requirement for human-robot interactions. Soft-robots provide an opportunity to cover the lack of compliance in conventional actuation mechanisms, however, the control of them is very challenging given their intrinsic…
Modular small-scale robots offer the potential for on-demand assembly and disassembly, enabling task-specific adaptation in dynamic and constrained environments. However, existing modular magnetic platforms often depend on workspace…
Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSMs) are widely employed in high-performance drive systems due to their high efficiency, power density, and precise dynamic behavior. However, nonlinearities, load disturbances, and parameter…
Inflated continuum robots are promising for a variety of navigation tasks, but controlling their motion with a small number of actuators is challenging. These inflated beam robots tend to buckle under compressive loads, producing extremely…
Permanent magnets provide an attractive path for shaping university-scale stellarator magnetic fields. Previous work has shown that greedy permanent magnet optimization (GPMO) can produce sparse, grid-aligned arrays that match target…