Related papers: Field-programmable dynamics in a soft magnetic act…
While its biological significance is well-documented, its application in soft robotics, particularly for the transport of fragile and irregularly shaped objects, remains underexplored. This study presents a modular soft robotic actuator…
Soft robotics hold promise in the development of safe yet powered assistive wearable devices for infants. Key to this is the development of closed-loop controllers that can help regulate pneumatic pressure in the device's actuators in an…
Soft robotics is advancing the use of flexible materials for adaptable robotic systems. Membrane-actuated soft robots address the limitations of traditional soft robots by using pressurized, extensible membranes to achieve stable, large…
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…
Information processing abilities of active matter are studied in the reservoir computing (RC) paradigm to infer the future state of a chaotic signal. We uncover an exceptional regime of agent dynamics that has been overlooked previously. It…
Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often…
Magnetic vortices are highly tunable, nonlinear systems with ideal properties for being applied in spin wave emission, data storage, and neuromorphic computing. However, their technological application is impaired by a limited understanding…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Uncertainties arising in various control systems, such as robots that are subject to unknown disturbances or environmental variations, pose significant challenges for ensuring system safety, such as collision avoidance. At the same time,…
Soft Robots distinguish themselves from traditional robots by embracing flexible kinematics. Because of their recent emergence, there exist numerous uncharted territories, including novel actuators, manufacturing processes, and advanced…
Soft robots utilizing inflatable dielectric membranes can realize intricate functionalities through the application of non-mechanical fields. However, given the current limitations in simulations, including low computational efficiency and…
Soft Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, can be considered as the "dual" of traditional rigid-bodied robots in terms of manipulability, degrees of freedom, and compliance. Introduced two decades ago, continuum arms have not…
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…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
Physical reservoir computing provides a powerful machine learning paradigm that exploits nonlinear physical dynamics for efficient information processing. By incorporating quantum effects, quantum reservoir computing offers superior…
Stability guarantees are crucial when ensuring a fully autonomous robot does not take undesirable or potentially harmful actions. Unfortunately, global stability guarantees are hard to provide in dynamical systems learned from data,…
In-materio computing exploits the intrinsic physical dynamics of materials to perform complex computations, enabling low-power, real-time data processing by embedding computation directly within physical layers. Here, we demonstrate a…
Soft robots are robotic systems made of deformable materials and exhibit unique flexibility that can be exploited for complex environments and tasks. However, their control problem has been considered a challenging subject because they are…
Soft electrothermal actuators are of great interest in diverse application domains for their simplicity, compliance, and ease of control. However, the very nature of thermally induced mechanical actuation sets inherent operation…