Related papers: ZipFold: Modular Actuators for Scaleable Adaptive …
Quadruped robots have strong adaptability to extreme environments but may also experience faults. Once these faults occur, robots must be repaired before returning to the task, reducing their practical feasibility. One prevalent concern…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Additive manufacturing strives to combine any combination of materials into three dimensional functional structures and devices, ultimately opening up the possibility of 3D printed machines. It remains difficult to actuate such devices,…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
This paper presents a haptic interface with modular linear actuators which can address limitations of conventional devices based on rotatory joints. The proposed haptic interface is composed of parallel linear actuators that provide high…
Large-scale shape-changing interfaces have great potential, but creating such systems requires substantial time, cost, space, and efforts, which hinders the research community to explore interactions beyond the scale of human hands. We…
We developed a new class of soft locomotive robots that can self-assemble into a preprogrammed configuration and vary their stiffness afterward in a highly integrated, compact body using contracting-cord particle jamming (CCPJ). We…
Soft actuators have drawn significant attention from researchers with an inherently compliant design to address the safety issues in physical human-robot interactions. However, they are also vulnerable and pose new challenges in the design,…
Electrically-driven soft robots based on piezoelectric actuators may enable compact form factors and maneuverability in complex environments. In most prior work, piezoelectric actuators are used to control a single degree of freedom. In…
Soft pneumatic actuators are widely used in soft robotics because they can produce large motions while remaining compliant enough to interact safely with objects, environments, and the human body. However, their performance is not solely…
A remarkable property of nastic, shape changing plants is their complete fusion between actuators and structure. This is achieved by combining a large number of cells whose geometry, internal pressures and material properties are optimized…
We introduce an elastic-driven self-folding approach that fabricates robots directly from flat 3D-printed conductive PLA nets. Elastic bands routed through printed hooks store energy that folds the sheet into programmed 3D geometries, while…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…
Object manipulation is a fundamental challenge in robotics, where systems must balance trade-offs among manipulation capabilities, system complexity, and throughput. Distributed manipulator systems (DMS) use the coordinated motion of…
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…
Soft robotics gripper have shown great promise in handling fragile and geometrically complex objects. However, most existing solutions rely on bulky actuators, complex control strategies, or advanced tactile sensing to achieve stable and…
The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…