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Soft robots have become increasingly popular for complex manipulation tasks requiring gentle and safe contact. However, their softness makes accurate control challenging, and high-fidelity sensing is a prerequisite to adequate control…
Soft multi-axis force/torque sensors provide safe and precise force interaction. Capturing the complete degree-of-freedom of force is imperative for accurate force measurement with six-axis force/torque sensors. However, cross-axis coupling…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
Mechanically characterizing the human-machine interface is essential to understanding user behavior and optimizing wearable robot performance. This interface has been challenging to sensorize due to manufacturing complexity and non-linear…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Soft machines are poised to deliver significant real-world impact, with soft robotics emerging as a key sub-discipline. This field integrates biological inspiration, materials science, and embodied intelligence to create bio-robotic…
Robots have been brought to work close to humans in many scenarios. For coexistence and collaboration, robots should be safe and pleasant for humans to interact with. To this end, the robots could be both physically soft with multimodal…
One of the many secrets to the success and prevalence of insects is their versatile, robust, and complex exoskeleton morphology. A fundamental challenge in insect-inspired robotics has been the fabrication of robotic exoskeletons that can…
The rapid design and fabrication of soft robotic matter is of growing interest for shape morphing, actuation, and wearable devices. Here, we report a facile fabrication method for creating soft robotic materials with embedded pneumatics…
Microfluidic channels have emerged as useful tools to control dynamic forcing on transported microscale objects, as encountered in emulsions, biological flows, and other soft matter systems. Tailored channel designs enable precise…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…
The safety and accuracy of robotic navigation hold paramount importance, especially in the realm of soft continuum robotics, where the limitations of traditional rigid sensors become evident. Encoders, piezoresistive, and potentiometer…
Sensory feedback is essential for the control of soft robotic systems and to enable deployment in a variety of different tasks. Proprioception refers to sensing the robot's own state and is of crucial importance in order to deploy soft…
Compression of soft bodies is central to biology, materials science, and robotics, yet existing contact theories break down at large deformations. Here, we develop a general framework for soft-body compression by extending the method of…
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a promising solution for handling the complexity of fabricating soft robots. However, the AM of hyperelastic materials is still challenging with a limited material range. Within this work, pellet-based 3D…
Robotic fingers made of soft material and compliant structures usually lead to superior adaptation when interacting with the unstructured physical environment. In this paper, we present an embedded sensing solution using optical fibers for…
This paper presents a novel soft robotic system for a deformable mannequin that can be employed to physically realize the 3D geometry of different human bodies. The soft membrane on a mannequin is deformed by inflating several curved…
Soft bodies made from flexible and deformable materials are popular in many robotics applications, but their proprioceptive sensing has been a long-standing challenge. In other words, there has hardly been a method to measure and model the…
Human-like embodied tactile perception is crucial for the next-generation intelligent robotics. Achieving large-area, full-body soft coverage with high sensitivity and rapid response, akin to human skin, remains a formidable challenge due…
The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…