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Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
In the last two decades the scientific community has shown a great interest in understanding and shaping the interaction mechanisms between humans and robots. The interaction implies communication between two dyadic agents and, if the type…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Artificial electronic skins covering complete robot bodies can make physical human-robot collaboration safe and hence possible. Standards for collaborative robots (e.g., ISO/TS 15066) prescribe permissible forces and pressures during…
With soft robotics being increasingly employed in settings demanding high and controlled contact forces, recent research has demonstrated the use of soft robots to estimate or intrinsically sense forces without requiring external sensing…
Towards the goal of robots performing robust and intelligent physical interactions with people, it is crucial that robots are able to accurately sense the human body, follow trajectories around the body, and track human motion. This study…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…
Until recently, the concept of soft robot safety was an informal notion, often attributed solely to the fact that soft robots are less likely to damage their operating environment than rigid robots. As the field moves toward feedback…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…
Goal: A limitation in robotic surgery is the lack of force feedback, due to challenges in suitable sensing techniques. To enhance the perception of the surgeons and precise force rendering, estimation of these forces along with tissue…
This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position…
Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…
This work explores the effect of object weight on human motion and grip release during handovers to enhance the naturalness, safety, and efficiency of robot-human interactions. We introduce adaptive robotic strategies based on the analysis…
Soft multi-axis force/torque sensors provide safe and precise force interaction. Capturing the complete degree-of-freedom of force is imperative for accurate force measurement with six-axis force/torque sensors. However, cross-axis coupling…
Robotic palpation relies on force sensing, but force signals in soft-tissue environments are variable and cannot reliably reveal subtle subsurface features. We present a compact multimodal sensor that integrates high-resolution vision-based…
Variable Stiffness Actuators prove invaluable for robotics applications in unstructured environments, fostering safe interactions and enhancing task adaptability. Nevertheless, their mechanical design inevitably results in larger and…