Related papers: Reconfigurable Auxetic Devices (RADs) for Robotic …
Human fingers achieve exceptional dexterity and adaptability by combining structures with varying stiffness levels, from soft tissues (low) to tendons and cartilage (medium) to bones (high). This paper explores developing a robotic finger…
Assistive Exoskeleton Robots are helping restore functions to people suffering from underlying medical conditions. These robots require precise tuning of hyper-parameters to feel natural to the user. The device hyper-parameters often need…
Modeling arbitrarily large deformations of surfaces smoothly embedded in three-dimensional space is challenging. The difficulties come from two aspects: the existing geometry processing or forward simulation methods penalize the difference…
Surface cracks in infrastructure can lead to severe deterioration and expensive maintenance if not efficiently repaired. Manual repair methods are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and imprecise. While advancements in robotic perception and…
Manipulating deformable objects in robotic cells is often costly and not widely accessible. However, the use of localized pneumatic gripping systems can enhance accessibility. Current methods that use pneumatic grippers to handle deformable…
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the significance of active mechanical metamaterials capable of being remotely manipulated through changes in external stimuli. While research in this area has achieved considerable…
Assembling lattices from discrete building blocks enables the composition of large, heterogeneous, and easily reconfigurable objects with desirable mass-to-stiffness ratios. This type of building system may also be referred to as a digital…
Anisotropic laminates with a negative Poisson's ratio for at least some directions are called auxetic. In this paper, we consider the conditions for optimizing the auxeticity of an orthotropic laminate, namely: for a laminate composed by a…
In assistive robots, compliant actuator is a key component in establishing safe and satisfactory physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). The performance of compliant actuators largely depends on the stiffness of the elastic element.…
Bistable Auxetic Metamaterials (BAMs) are a class of monolithic perforated periodic structures with negative Poisson's ratio. Under tension, a BAM can expand and reach a second state of equilibrium through a globally large shape…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Extrinsic manipulation, a technique that enables robots to leverage extrinsic resources for object manipulation, presents practical yet challenging scenarios. Particularly in the context of extrinsic manipulation on a supporting plane,…
Non-flat surfaces pose difficulties for robots operating in unstructured environments. Reconstructions of uneven surfaces may only be partially possible due to non-compliant end-effectors and limitations on vision systems such as…
Robot arms that assist humans should be able to pick up, move, and release everyday objects. Today's assistive robot arms use rigid grippers to pinch items between fingers; while these rigid grippers are well suited for large and heavy…
For robot arms to perform everyday tasks in unstructured environments, these robots must be able to manipulate a diverse range of objects. Today's robots often grasp objects with either soft grippers or rigid end-effectors. However, purely…
When deploying reinforcement learning policies to physical robots, actuator rate constraints -- hard limits on how fast each joint can move per control step -- are unavoidable. These limits vary substantially across joints due to…
While rigid robots are extensively used in various applications, they are limited in the tasks they can perform and can be unsafe in close human-robot interactions. Soft robots on the other hand surpass the capabilities of rigid robots in…
This paper presents an auxetic medium, consisting of a two-dimensional perforated sheet where the holes are arranged in a repetitive pattern. The hexagonal disposition of the perforations makes the medium isotropic in the plane. It is shown…
Learning to manipulate objects efficiently, particularly those involving sustained contact (e.g., pushing, sliding) and articulated parts (e.g., drawers, doors), presents significant challenges. Traditional methods, such as robot-centric…
Accurate modelling of object deformations is crucial for a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks, where interacting with soft or deformable objects is essential. Current methods struggle to generalise to unseen forces or adapt to new…