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Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…
This paper presents a soft robot finger capable of adaptive-twist deformation to grasp objects by wrapping them. For a soft hand to grasp and pick-up one object from densely contained multiple objects, a soft finger requires the…
We posit that embodied artificial intelligence is not only a computational, but also a materials problem. While the importance of material and structural properties in the control loop are well understood, materials can take an active role…
Wearable electronics are emerging as essential tools for health monitoring, haptic feedback, and human-computer interactions. While stable contact at the device-body interface is critical for these applications, it remains challenging due…
The most common sensing modalities found in a robot perception system are vision and touch, which together can provide global and highly localized data for manipulation. However, these sensing modalities often fail to adequately capture the…
This paper introduces a novel Soft Acoustic Curvature (SAC) sensor. SAC incorporates integrated audio components and features an acoustic channel within a flexible structure. A reference acoustic wave, generated by a speaker at one end of…
Vacuum-forming is a common manufacturing technique for constructing thin plastic shell products by pressing heated plastic sheets onto a mold using atmospheric pressure. Vacuum-forming is ubiquitous in packaging and casing products in…
The 'infinite' passive degrees of freedom of soft robotic arms render their control especially challenging. In this paper, we leverage a previously developed model, which drawing equivalence of the soft arm to a series of universal joints,…
The development of wearable sensing systems for sports performance tracking, rehabilitation, and injury prevention has driven growing demand for smart garments that combine comfort, durability, and accurate motion detection. This paper…
In recent years, soft robotics simulators have evolved to offer various functionalities, including the simulation of different material types (e.g., elastic, hyper-elastic) and actuation methods (e.g., pneumatic, cable-driven, servomotor).…
3D-printed bellow soft pneumatic arms are widely adopted for their flexible design, ease of fabrication, and large deformation capabilities. However, their low stiffness limits their real-world applications. Although several methods exist…
Pneumatic soft robots present many advantages in manipulation tasks. Notably, their inherent compliance makes them safe and reliable in unstructured and fragile environments. However, full-body shape sensing for pneumatic soft robots is…
The technological transition from soft machines to soft robots necessarily passes through the integration of soft electronics and sensors. This allows for the establishment of feedback control systems while preserving the softness of the…
Capacitive technology allows building sensors that are small, compact and have high sensitivity. For this reason it has been widely adopted in robotics. In a previous work we presented a compliant skin system based on capacitive technology…
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
The Piecewise Constant Curvature (PCC) model is the most widely used soft robotic modeling and control. However, the PCC fails to accurately describe the deformation of the soft robots when executing dynamic tasks or interacting with the…
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and…
Grasping deformable objects is not well researched due to the complexity in modelling and simulating the dynamic behavior of such objects. However, with the rapid development of physics-based simulators that support soft bodies, the…
The images captured by vision-based tactile sensors carry information about high-resolution tactile fields, such as the distribution of the contact forces applied to their soft sensing surface. However, extracting the information encoded in…
We present a self-contained, soft robotic hand composed of soft pneumatic actuator modules that are equipped with strain and pressure sensing. We show how this data can be used to discern whether a grasp was successful. Co-locating sensing…