Related papers: ShapeForce: Low-Cost Soft Robotic Wrist for Contac…

High-density afferents in the human hand have long been regarded as essential for human grasping and manipulation abilities. In contrast, robotic tactile sensors are typically used to provide low-density contact data, such as…

Soft optical tactile sensors enable robots to manipulate deformable objects by capturing important features such as high-resolution contact geometry and estimations of object compliance. This work presents a variable stiffness soft tactile…

Providing force feedback as relevant information in current Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery systems constitutes a technological challenge due to the constraints imposed by the surgical environment. In this context, Sensorless…

Six axis force-torque sensors are commonly attached to the wrist of serial robots to measure the external forces and torques acting on the robot's end-effector. These measurements are used for load identification, contact detection, and…

Unlike human beings that can employ the entire surface of their limbs as a means to establish contact with their environment, robots are typically programmed to interact with their environments via their end-effectors, in a collision-free…

In this paper, the problem of making a safe compliant contact between a human and an assistive robot is considered. Users with disabilities have a need to utilize their assistive robots for physical human-robot interaction (PHRI) during…

Flexible tendon sheath mechanism is commonly used in NOTES systems because it offers high flexibility, light weight, and easy transmission. Due to the size constraints and sterilization problems, traditional sensors like force/torque sensor…

Robots in many real-world settings have access to force/torque sensors in their gripper and tactile sensing is often necessary in tasks that involve contact-rich motion. In this work, we leverage surprise from mismatches in touch feedback…

Soft robotic systems offer benefits over traditional rigid systems through reduced contact trauma with soft tissues and by enabling access through tortuous paths in minimally invasive surgery. However, the inherent deformability of soft…

In robotic manipulation, tactile sensors are indispensable, especially when dealing with soft objects, objects of varying dimensions, or those out of the robot's direct line of sight. Traditional tactile sensors often grapple with…

Fluid-based soft actuators are an attractive option for lightweight and human-safe robots. These actuators, combined with fluid pressure force feedback, are in principle a form of series-elastic actuation (SEA), in which nearly all…

Stiffness variation and real-time position feedback are critical for any robotic system but most importantly for active and wearable devices to interact with the user and environment. Currently, for compact sizes, there is a lack of…

Despite decades of research, general purpose in-hand manipulation remains one of the unsolved challenges of robotics. One of the contributing factors that limit current robotic manipulation systems is the difficulty of precisely sensing…

Human skin can accurately sense the self-decoupled normal and shear forces when in contact with objects of different sizes. Although there exist many soft and conformable tactile sensors on robotic applications able to decouple the normal…

Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…

In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…

Hardness is among the most important attributes of an object that humans learn about through touch. However, approaches for robots to estimate hardness are limited, due to the lack of information provided by current tactile sensors. In this…

Three-dimensional shape sensing in soft and continuum robotics is a crucial aspect for stable actuation and control in fields such as Minimally Invasive surgery, as the estimation of complex curvatures while using continuum robotic tools is…

Many manipulation tasks require careful force modulation. With insufficient force the task may fail, while excessive force could cause damage. The high cost, bulky size and fragility of commercial force/torque (F/T) sensors have limited…

Accurately estimating object mass and friction is fundamental to achieving reliable and adaptive robotic manipulation. Although interactive perception provides a powerful mechanism for inferring such properties, most existing approaches…