Related papers: Soft Responsive Materials Enhance Humanoid Safety
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
This work explores the effect of object weight on human motion and grip release during handovers to enhance the naturalness, safety, and efficiency of robot-human interactions. We introduce adaptive robotic strategies based on the analysis…
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…
Humanoid robots have demonstrated impressive motor skills in a wide range of tasks, yet whole-body control for humanlike long-time, dynamic fighting remains particularly challenging due to the stringent requirements on agility and…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…
Many current robot designs prioritize efficiency and one-size-fits-all solutions, oftentimes overlooking personalization, adaptability, and sustainability. To explore alternatives, we conducted two co-design workshops with 23 participants,…
Motion imitation is a pivotal and effective approach for humanoid robots to achieve a more diverse range of complex and expressive movements, making their performances more human-like. However, the significant differences in kinematics and…
We present a reinforcement learning based framework for human-centered collaborative systems. The framework is proactive and balances the benefits of timely actions with the risk of taking improper actions by minimizing the total time spent…
In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…
In this paper, we consider a general task of jumping varying distances and heights for a quadrupedal robot in noisy environments, such as off of uneven terrain and with variable robot dynamics parameters. To accurately jump in such…
Robots come in various forms and have different characteristics that may shape the interaction with them. In human-human interactions, height is a characteristic that shapes human dynamics, with taller people typically perceived as more…
Soft robots offer unmatched adaptability and safety in unstructured environments, yet their compliant, high-dimensional, and nonlinear dynamics make modeling for control notoriously difficult. Existing data-driven approaches often fail to…
The new paradigm of human-robot collaboration has led to the creation of shared work environments in which humans and robots work in close contact with each other. Consequently, the safety regulations have been updated addressing these new…
While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…
Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…
Integrating Brain-Machine Interfaces into non-clinical applications like robot motion control remains difficult - despite remarkable advancements in clinical settings. Specifically, EEG-based motor imagery systems are still error-prone,…
Object manipulation in robotics faces challenges due to diverse object shapes, sizes, and fragility. Gripper-based methods offer precision and low degrees of freedom (DOF) but the gripper limits the kind of objects to grasp. On the other…
Neurorehabilitation conventionally relies on the interaction between a patient and a physical therapist. Robotic systems can improve and enrich the physical feedback provided to patients after neurological injury, but they under-utilize the…
The ocean vast unexplored regions and diverse soft-bodied marine organisms have spurred interest in bio-inspired underwater soft robotics. Recent advances have enabled new capabilities in underwater movement, sensing, and interaction.…