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Parallel robots are capable of high-speed manipulation and have become essential tools in the industry. The proximal placement of their motors and the low weight of their end effectors make them ideal for generating highly dynamic motion.…
Aerial robots have garnered significant attention due to their potential applications in various industries, such as inspection, search and rescue, and drone delivery. Successful missions often depend on the ability of these robots to grasp…
Inflated-beam soft robots, such as tip-everting vine robots, can control curvature by contracting one beam side via pneumatic actuation. This work develops a general finite element modeling approach to characterize their bending. The model…
We present a fully edible pneumatic actuator based on gelatin-glycerol composite. The actuator is monolithic, fabricated via a molding process, and measures 90 mm in length, 20 mm in width, and 17 mm in thickness. Thanks to the composite…
Soft pneumatic actuators are used to steer soft growing "vine" robots while being flexible enough to undergo the tip eversion required for growth. In this study, we compared the performance of three types of pneumatic actuators in terms of…
Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…
Variable Stiffness Actuators prove invaluable for robotics applications in unstructured environments, fostering safe interactions and enhancing task adaptability. Nevertheless, their mechanical design inevitably results in larger and…
A key challenge in robotics is to create efficient methods for grasping objects with diverse shapes, sizes, poses, and properties. Grasping with hand-like end effectors often requires careful selection of hand orientation and finger…
Miniature robots are untethered actuators, which have significant potential to make existing minimally invasive surgery considerably safer and painless, and enable unprecedented treatments because they are much smaller and dexterous than…
Stiffness variation and real-time position feedback are critical for any robotic system but most importantly for active and wearable devices to interact with the user and environment. Currently, for compact sizes, there is a lack of…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
The collective motion of arrays of cilia - tiny, hairlike protrusions - drives the locomotion of numerous microorganisms, enabling multimodal motion and autonomous switching between gaits to navigate complex environments. To endow…
Object manipulation in robotics faces challenges due to diverse object shapes, sizes, and fragility. Gripper-based methods offer precision and low degrees of freedom (DOF) but the gripper limits the kind of objects to grasp. On the other…
The simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) transfer of large-scale hydraulic robots presents a significant challenge in robotics because of the inherent slow control response and complex fluid dynamics. The complex dynamics result from the…
Soft robots are powerful tools for manipulating delicate objects, yet their adoption is hindered by two gaps: the lack of integrated tactile sensing and sensor signal distortion caused by actuator deformations. This paper addresses these…
Vine-inspired robots achieve large workspace coverage through tip eversion, enabling safe navigation in confined and cluttered environments. However, their deployment in free space is fundamentally limited by low axial stiffness, poor…
This letter proposes a novel single-fingered reconfigurable robotic gripper for grasping objects in narrow working spaces. The finger of the developed gripper realizes two configurations, namely, the insertion and grasping modes, using only…
Rapid and versatile object manipulation in air is an open challenge. An energy-efficient and adaptive soft gripper combined with an agile aerial vehicle could revolutionize aerial robotic manipulation in areas such as warehousing. This…
Exploration of various applications is the frontier of research on inflatable robots. We proposed an articulated robots consisting of multiple pneumatic bladder links connected by rolling contact joints called Hillberry joints. The bladder…
This paper presents an open-source MATLAB/Simulink physics simulator for rigid-body articulated systems, including manipulators and floating-base robots. Thanks to MATLAB/Simulink features like MATLAB system classes and Simulink function…