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Soft materials are not only highly deformable but they also possess rich and diverse body dynamics. Soft body dynamics exhibit a variety of properties, including nonlinearity, elasticity, and potentially infinitely many degrees of freedom.…
Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…
A stochastic representation of the dynamics of open quantum systems, suitable for non-perturbative system-reservoir interaction, non-Markovian effects and arbitrarily driven systems is presented. It includes the case of driving on…
Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article…
Soft robot serial chain manipulators with the capability for growth, stiffness control, and discrete joints have the potential to approach the dexterity of traditional robot arms, while improving safety, lowering cost, and providing an…
Living systems continuously sense, integrate, and act on chemical information using multiscale biochemical networks whose dynamics are inherently nonlinear, adaptive, and energy-efficient. Yet, most attempts to harness such "wetware" for…
Skeletal muscle-based biohybrid actuators have proved to be a promising component in soft robotics, offering efficient movement. However, their intrinsic biological variability and nonlinearity pose significant challenges for…
Dynamical systems are capable of performing computation in a reservoir computing paradigm. This paper presents a general representation of these systems as an artificial neural network (ANN). Initially, we implement the simplest dynamical…
This paper presents a new theory, known as robust dynamic pro- gramming, for a class of continuous-time dynamical systems. Different from traditional dynamic programming (DP) methods, this new theory serves as a fundamental tool to analyze…
Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…
Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…
Soft growing robots are novel devices that mimic plant-like growth for navigation in cluttered or dangerous environments. Their ability to adapt to surroundings, combined with advancements in actuation and manufacturing technologies, allows…
Continuum soft robots are inherently underactuated and subject to intrinsic input constraints, making dynamic control particularly challenging, especially in hybrid rigid-soft robots. While most existing methods focus on quasi-static…
The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…
Conventional soft pneumatic actuators, typically based on hollow elastomeric chambers, often suffer from small structural support and require costly geometry-specific redesigns for multimodal functionality. Porous materials such as foam,…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Robotic manipulation behavior should be robust to disturbances that violate high-level task-structure. Such robustness can be achieved by constantly monitoring the environment to observe the discrete high-level state of the task. This is…
Reluctance actuators are preferred for high-precision applications. Due to resistive losses in the coils, the accuracy of this type of actuator will reduce in quasi-static operation mode within a vacuum environment. By using soft permanent…
Pneumatically-actuated anthropomorphic robots with high degrees of freedom (DOF) offer significant potential for physical human-robot interaction. However, precise control of pneumatic actuators is challenging due to their inherent…
Whereas the importance of transient dynamics to the functionality and management of complex systems has been increasingly recognized, most of the studies are based on models. Yet in realistic situations the models are often unknown and what…