Related papers: SORS: A Modular, High-Fidelity Simulator for Soft …
Rigid robots were extensively researched, whereas soft robotics remains an underexplored field. Utilizing soft-legged robots in performing tasks as a replacement for human beings is an important stride to take, especially under harsh and…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Simulation is a central tool for scalable robot learning, but its effectiveness depends on the quality of object assets. While modern 3D datasets provide rich geometric and kinematic representations, they typically lack the physical…
Robotic simulators provide cost-effective and risk-free virtual environments for studying robotic designs, control algorithms, and sensor integrations. They typically host extensive libraries of sensors and actuators that facilitate rapid…
As robots increasingly coexist with humans, they must navigate complex, dynamic environments rich in visual information and implicit social dynamics, like when to yield or move through crowds. Addressing these challenges requires…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
The field of robotics has made significant advances towards generalist robot manipulation policies. However, real-world evaluation of such policies is not scalable and faces reproducibility challenges, which are likely to worsen as policies…
Soft robots have many advantages over rigid robots thanks to their compliant and passive nature. However, it is generally challenging to model the dynamics of soft robots due to their high spatial dimensionality, making it difficult to use…
Cosserat rod theory is the popular approach to modeling ferromagnetic soft robots as 1-Dimensional (1D) slender structures in most applications, such as biomedical. However, recent soft robots designed for locomotion and manipulation often…
Real-to-Sim-to-Real technique is gaining increasing interest for robotic manipulation, as it can generate scalable data in simulation while having narrower sim-to-real gap. However, previous methods mainly focused on environment-level…
Contact feedback is essential for contact-rich robotic manipulation, as it allows the robot to detect subtle interaction changes and adjust its actions accordingly. Six-axis force-torque sensors are commonly used to obtain contact feedback,…
We present an implementation of SOTER, a run-time assurance framework for building safe distributed mobile robotic (DMR) systems, on top of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The safety of DMR systems cannot always be guaranteed at design…
Incorporating effective tactile sensing and mechanical compliance is key towards enabling robust and safe operation of robots in unknown, uncertain and cluttered environments. Towards realizing this goal, we present a lightweight,…
Continuum and soft robots can transform diverse sectors, including healthcare, agriculture, marine, and space, thanks to their potential to adaptively interact with unstructured environments. These robots exhibit complex mechanics that pose…
With soft robotics being increasingly employed in settings demanding high and controlled contact forces, recent research has demonstrated the use of soft robots to estimate or intrinsically sense forces without requiring external sensing…
The simulation of multi-body systems with frictional contacts is a fundamental tool for many fields, such as robotics, computer graphics, and mechanics. Hard frictional contacts are particularly troublesome to simulate because they make the…
While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
Force and proximity sensors are key in robotics, especially when applied in collaborative robots that interact physically or cognitively with humans in real unstructured environments. However, most existing sensors for use in robotics are…
Magnetic soft continuum robots (MSCRs) have emerged as a promising technology for minimally invasive interventions, offering enhanced dexterity and remote-controlled navigation in confined lumens. Unlike conventional guidewires with…