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Soft robotics increasingly relies on smart materials and innovative structures, with bistable tape springs emerging as a promising option. These structures exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as oscillation, due to their inherent…

Current rigid linkage grippers are limited in flexibility, and gripper design optimality relies on expertise, experiments, or arbitrary parameters. Our proposed rigid gripper can accommodate irregular and off-center objects through a…

Compliant grippers, owing to adaptivity and safety, have attracted considerable attention for unstructured grasping in real applications, such as industrial or logistic scenarios. However, accurately modeling the bidirectional relationship…

Bimanual grasping is essential for robots to handle large and complex objects. However, existing methods either focus solely on single-arm grasping or employ separate grasp generation and bimanual evaluation stages, leading to coordination…

A design concept is introduced for the building block, a dot, of programmable braille readers utilizing bistable shell buckling, magnetic actuation, and pneumatic loading. The design process is guided by Finite Element simulations, which…

Soft robotic grippers gently and safely manipulate delicate objects due to their inherent adaptability and softness. Limited by insufficient stiffness and imprecise force control, conventional soft grippers are not suitable for applications…

The manipulation of garments poses research challenges due to their deformable nature and the extensive variability in shapes and sizes. Despite numerous attempts by researchers to address these via approaches involving robot perception and…

Bistable mechanisms are prevalent across a broad spectrum of applications due to their ability to maintain two distinct stable states. Their energy consumption is predominantly confined to the process of state transitions, thereby enhancing…

Soft pneumatic gripping strategies are often based on pressurized actuation of structures made of soft elastomeric materials, which limits designs in terms of size, weight, achievable forces, and ease of fabrication. On the other hand,…

Grasping objects with diverse mechanical properties, such as heavy, slippery, or fragile items, remains a significant challenge in robotics. Conventional grippers often rely on applying high normal forces, which can cause damage to objects.…

Fruit harvesting remains predominantly a labor-intensive process, motivating the development of research for robotic grippers. Conventional rigid or vacuum-driven grippers require complex mechanical design or high energy consumption.…

We propose a framework for optimizing a planar parallel-jaw gripper for use with multiple objects. While optimizing general-purpose grippers and contact locations for grasps are both well studied, co-optimizing grasps and the gripper…

Extreme deformation can drastically morph a structure from one structural form into another. Programming such deformation properties into the structure is often challenging and in many cases an impossible task. The morphed forms do not hold…

Achieving human-like dexterity in robotic grippers remains an open challenge, particularly in ensuring robust manipulation in uncertain environments. Soft robotic hands try to address this by leveraging passive compliance, a characteristic…

This paper develops model-based grasp planning algorithms for assembly tasks. It focuses on industrial end-effectors like grippers and suction cups, and plans grasp configurations considering CAD models of target objects. The developed…

Fine assembly tasks such as electrical connector insertion have tight tolerances and sensitive components, limiting the speed and robustness of robot assembly, even when using vision, tactile, or force sensors. Connector insertion is a…

This paper presents a single-actuator passive gripper that achieves both stable grasping and continuous bidirectional in-hand rotation through mechanically encoded power transmission logic. Unlike conventional multifunctional grippers that…

A novel robust mechanism for the generation of "trapping states" is shown to exist in the coupling of a two-level system with an oscillator, which is based on nonlinearities in the laser-induced vibronic coupling. This mechanism is…

Recently, magnetorheological elastomers have become an interesting smart material with many new designs for robotics. A variety of applications have been built with magnetorheological elastomers, such as vibration absorbers, actuators, or…

Structural instability is a hazard that leads to catastrophic failure and is generally avoided through special designs. A trend, however, has emerged over the past decades pointing to the harnessing of mechanisms with instability. Inspired…