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Continuum robots, known for their high flexibility and adaptability, offer immense potential for applications such as medical surgery, confined-space inspections, and wearable devices. However, their non-linear elastic nature and complex…
Fast, accurate, and generalizable simulations are a key enabler of modern advances in robot design and control. However, existing simulation frameworks in robotics either model rigid environments and mechanisms only, or if they include…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
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…
Compliant grippers, owing to adaptivity and safety, have attracted considerable attention for unstructured grasping in real applications, such as industrial or logistic scenarios. However, accurately modeling the bidirectional relationship…
In this paper, we model the configurations of a system of hard rods by viewing each rod in a cell formed by its neighbors. By minimizing the free energy in the model and performing molecular dynamics, where, in both cases, the shape of the…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Flexible slender structures such as rods, ribbons, plates, and shells exhibit extreme nonlinear responses bending, twisting, buckling, wrinkling, and self contact, that defy conventional simulation frameworks. Discrete Differential Geometry…
Macroscopic elastic core-shell systems can be generated as toy models to be deformed and haptically studied by hand. On the mesoscale, colloidal core-shell particles and microgels are fabricated and investigated by different types of…
Soft materials often display complex behaviors that transition through apparent solid- and fluid-like regimes. While a growing number of microscale simulation methods exist for these materials, reduced-order models that encapsulate the…
Soft bodies made from flexible and deformable materials are popular in many robotics applications, but their proprioceptive sensing has been a long-standing challenge. In other words, there has hardly been a method to measure and model the…
An energy-based modeling framework for the nonlinear dynamics of spatial Cosserat rods undergoing large displacements and rotations is proposed. The mixed formulation features independent displacement, velocity and stress variables and is…
Precise kinematic modeling is critical in calibration and controller design for soft robots, yet remains a challenging issue due to their highly nonlinear and complex behaviors. To tackle the issue, numerous data-driven machine learning…
Based on previous work for the static problem, in this paper we first derive one form of dynamic finite-strain shell equations for incompressible hyperelastic materials that involve three shell constitutive relations. In order to single out…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
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…
We present a general approach to the bifurcation analysis of elastic frameworks with symmetry. While group-theoretic methods for bifurcation problems with symmetry are well known, their actual implementation in the context of elastic…
Understanding looping probabilities, including the particular case of ring-closure or cyclization, of fluctuating polymers (eg DNA) is important in many applications in molecular biology and chemistry. In a continuum limit the configuration…
Soft robots could bring robotic systems to new horizons, by enabling safe human-machine interaction. For precise control, these soft structures require high level position feedback that is not easily achieved through conventional…
The rapid design and fabrication of soft robotic matter is of growing interest for shape morphing, actuation, and wearable devices. Here, we report a facile fabrication method for creating soft robotic materials with embedded pneumatics…