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Climbing soft robots are of tremendous interest in both science and engineering due to their potential applications in intelligent surveillance, inspection, maintenance, and detection under environments away from the ground. The challenge…
Soft pneumatic actuators have seen applications in many soft robotic systems, and their pressure-driven nature presents unique challenges and opportunities for controlling their motion. In this work, we present a new concept: designing and…
Hand-wearable robots, specifically exoskeletons, are designed to aid hands in daily activities, playing a crucial role in post-stroke rehabilitation and assisting the elderly. Our contribution to this field is a textile robotic glove with…
Soft robots have the potential to revolutionize the use of robotic systems with their capability of establishing safe, robust, and adaptable interactions with their environment, but their precise control remains challenging. In contrast,…
Articulated object manipulation is a critical capability for robots to perform various tasks in real-world scenarios. Composed of multiple parts connected by joints, articulated objects are endowed with diverse functional mechanisms through…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
Recent advances in active materials and fabrication techniques have enabled the production of cyclically self-deployable metamaterials with an expanded functionality space. However, designing metamaterials that possess continuously tunable…
Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to…
The range of robot activities is expanding from industries with fixed environments to diverse and changing environments, such as nursing care support and daily life support. In particular, autonomous construction of robots that are…
Lightweight, durable textile-based inflatable soft actuators are widely used in soft robotics, particularly for wearable robots in rehabilitation and in enhancing human performance in demanding jobs. Fabricating these actuators typically…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
Deployable structures, essential across various engineering applications ranging from umbrellas to satellites, are evolving to include soft, morphable designs where geometry drives transformation. However, a major challenge for soft…
The ability to deal with articulated objects is very important for robots assisting humans. In this work, a framework to robustly and adaptively operate common doors, using an autonomous mobile manipulator, is proposed. To push forward the…
This paper presents a novel modular robot system that can self-reconfigure to achieve omnidirectional movements for collaborative object transportation. Each robotic module is equipped with a steerable omni-wheel for navigation and is…
Pneumatically-actuated anthropomorphic robots with high degrees of freedom (DOF) offer significant potential for physical human-robot interaction. However, precise control of pneumatic actuators is challenging due to their inherent…
This paper contains a thorough investigation of the performance of electrically activated layered soft dielectric composite actuators under plane deformation. Noting that the activation can be induced controlling either the voltage or the…
Under-actuated compliant robotic systems offer a promising approach to mitigating actuation and control challenges by harnessing pre-designed, embodied dynamic behaviors. This paper presents Flix-Walker, a novel, untethered,…
This paper present a novel dual-speed actuator adapted to robotics. In many applications, robots have to bear large loads while moving slowly and also have to move quickly through the air with almost no load. This lead to conflicting…
Biological systems, such as the octopus, exhibit masterful cross-scale manipulation by adaptively reconfiguring their entire form, a capability that remains elusive in robotics. Conventional soft grippers, while compliant, are mostly…