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Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
This paper presents a low-cost, centralized modular underwater robot platform, ModCube, which can be used to study swarm coordination for a wide range of tasks in underwater environments. A ModCube structure consists of multiple ModCube…
When a mobile robot lacks high onboard computing or networking capabilities, it can rely on remote computing architecture for its control and autonomy. This paper introduces a novel collaborative Simulation Twin (ST) strategy for control…
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,…
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 growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
Underwater object detection for robot picking has attracted a lot of interest. However, it is still an unsolved problem due to several challenges. We take steps towards making it more realistic by addressing the following challenges.…
Robots moving safely and in a socially compliant manner in dynamic human environments is an essential benchmark for long-term robot autonomy. However, it is not feasible to learn and benchmark social navigation behaviors entirely in the…
Underwater robotic manipulation faces significant challenges due to complex fluid dynamics and unstructured environments, causing most manipulation systems to rely heavily on human teleoperation. In this paper, we introduce AquaBot, a fully…
The one-to-one mapping of control inputs to actuator outputs results in elaborate routing architectures that limit how complex fluidic soft robot behaviours can currently become. Embodied intelligence can be used as a tool to counteract…
One of the most important aspects of autonomous systems is safety. This includes ensuring safe human-robot and safe robot-environment interaction when autonomously performing complex tasks or in collaborative scenarios. Although several…
Micro-nano-robotic swimmers have promising potential for future biomedical tasks such as targeted drug delivery and minimally-invasive diagnosis. An efficient method for controlled actuation of such nano-swimmers is applying a rotating…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Soft robotic systems are known for their flexibility and adaptability, but traditional physics-based models struggle to capture their complex, nonlinear behaviors. This study explores a data-driven approach to modeling the…
Being able to simulate the outcomes of actions in varied environments will revolutionize the development of generalist agents at scale. However, modeling these world dynamics, especially for dexterous robotics tasks, poses significant…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…
Soft robots have drawn great interest due to their ability to take on a rich range of shapes and motions, compared to traditional rigid robots. However, the motions, and underlying statics and dynamics, pose significant challenges to…
Robotic swimmers are currently a subject of extensive research and development for several underwater applications. Clever design and planning must rely on simple theoretical models that account for the swimmer's hydrodynamics in order to…
The schooling behavior of fish is hypothesized to confer many survival benefits, including foraging success, safety from predators, and energy savings through hydrodynamic interactions when swimming in formation. Underwater robot…
Tendon-driven robots, a type of continuum robot, have the potential to reduce the invasiveness of surgery by enabling access to difficult-to-reach anatomical targets. In the future, the automation of surgical tasks for these robots may help…