Related papers: SORS: A Modular, High-Fidelity Simulator for Soft …
Autonomy in robot-assisted surgery is essential to reduce surgeons' cognitive load and eventually improve the overall surgical outcome. A key requirement for autonomy in a safety-critical scenario as surgery lies in the generation of…
Systems built on the Robot Operating System (ROS) are increasingly easy to assemble, yet hard to govern and reliably coordinate. Beyond the sheer number of subsystems involved, the difficulty stems from their diversity and interaction…
Software-intensive Systems-of-Systems (SoS) refer to an arrangement of managerially and operationally independent systems(i.e., constituent systems), which work collaboratively towards the achievement of global missions. Because some SoS…
Known attempts to build autonomous robots rely on complex control architectures, often implemented with the Robot Operating System platform (ROS). Runtime adaptation is needed in these systems, to cope with component failures and with…
To function autonomously in the physical world, humanoid robots need high-fidelity sensing systems, especially for forces that cannot be easily modeled. Modeling forces in robot feet is particularly challenging due to static indeterminacy,…
Bio-inspired soft robots have already shown the ability to handle uncertainty and adapt to unstructured environments. However, their availability is partially restricted by time-consuming, costly and highly supervised design-fabrication…
Soft object manipulation has recently gained popularity within the robotics community due to its potential applications in many economically important areas. Although great progress has been recently achieved in these types of tasks, most…
Developing and testing novel control and motion planning algorithms for aerial vehicles can be a challenging task, with the robotics community relying more than ever on 3D simulation technologies to evaluate the performance of new…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
The manipulation of large objects and safe operation in the vicinity of humans are key capabilities of a general purpose domestic robotic assistant. We present the design of a soft, tactile-sensing humanoid upper-body robot and demonstrate…
Control of soft robotic manipulators remains a challenge for designs with advanced capabilities and novel actuation. Two significant limitations are multi-axis, three-dimensional motion of soft bodies alongside actuator dynamics and…
Safety is one of the most fundamental aspects of robotics, especially when it comes to collaborative robots (cobots) that are expected to physically interact with humans. Although a large body of literature has focused on safety-related…
Robotic manipulation with deformable objects represents a data-intensive regime in embodied learning, where shape, contact, and topology co-evolve in ways that far exceed the variability of rigids. Although simulation promises relief from…
Reinforcement learning often requires extensive training data. Simulation-to-real transfer offers a promising approach to address this challenge in robotics. While differentiable simulators offer improved sample efficiency through exact…
An accurate, physically-based, and differentiable model of soft robots can unlock downstream applications in optimal control. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is an expressive approach for modeling highly deformable structures such as…
In today's high-pressure and isolated society, the demand for emotional support has surged, necessitating innovative solutions. Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) offer a technological approach to providing emotional assistance by leveraging…
Estimating a soft robot's pose and applied forces, also called proprioception, is crucial for safe interaction of the robot with its environment. However, most solutions for soft robot proprioception use dedicated sensors, particularly for…
Biological agents possess bodies that are mostly of soft tissues. Researchers have resorted to soft bodies to investigate Artificial Life (ALife)-related questions; similarly, a new era of soft-bodied robots has just begun. Nevertheless,…
The efficient optimization of actuated soft structures, particularly under complex nonlinear forces, remains a critical challenge in advancing robotics. Simulations of nonlinear structures, such as soft-bodied robots modeled using the…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…