Related papers: Simulation-Driven Evolutionary Motion Parameteriza…
Practical use of robotic manipulators made from soft materials requires generating and executing complex motions. We present the first approach for generating trajectories of a thermally-actuated soft robotic manipulator. Based on…
Contact-based motion planning for manipulation, object exploration or balancing often requires finding sequences of fixed and sliding contacts and planning the transition from one contact in the environment to another. However, most…
Mechanical compliance is a key design parameter for dynamic contact-rich manipulation, affecting task success and safety robustness over contact geometry variation. Design of soft robotic structures, such as compliant fingers, requires…
Dynamic motions are a key feature of robotic arms, enabling them to perform tasks quickly and efficiently. Soft continuum manipulators do not currently consider dynamic parameters when operating in task space. This shortcoming makes…
In this paper, we present a touch technology to achieve tactile interactivity for human-robot interaction (HRI) in soft robotics. By combining a capacitive touch sensor with an online solid mechanics simulation provided by the SOFA…
In this work, we aim to teach robots to manipulate various thin-shell materials. Prior works studying thin-shell object manipulation mostly rely on heuristic policies or learn policies from real-world video demonstrations, and only focus on…
We present in-hand manipulation tasks where a robot moves an object in grasp, maintains its external contact mode with the environment, and adjusts its in-hand pose simultaneously. The proposed manipulation task leads to complex contact…
This paper presents a novel vision-based proprioception approach for a soft robotic finger that can estimate and reconstruct tactile interactions in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The key to this system lies in the finger's…
This paper presents the application of a learning control approach for the realization of a fast and reliable pick-and-place application with a spherical soft robotic arm. The arm is characterized by a lightweight design and exhibits…
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,…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Endowing robots with tactile capabilities opens up new possibilities for their interaction with the environment, including the ability to handle fragile and/or soft objects. In this work, we equip the robot gripper with low-cost…
Soft optical tactile sensors enable robots to manipulate deformable objects by capturing important features such as high-resolution contact geometry and estimations of object compliance. This work presents a variable stiffness soft tactile…
Humans can effortlessly perform very complex, dexterous manipulation tasks by reacting to sensor observations. In contrast, robots can not perform reactive manipulation and they mostly operate in open-loop while interacting with their…
Simulation is a central tool for scalable robot learning, but its effectiveness depends on the quality of object assets. While modern 3D datasets provide rich geometric and kinematic representations, they typically lack the physical…
Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) remains a critical challenge in robotics due to the complexities of developing suitable model-based control strategies. Deformable Tool Manipulation (DTM) further complicates this task by introducing…
Deformable solid objects such as clay or dough are prevalent in industrial and home environments. However, robotic manipulation of such objects has largely remained unexplored in literature due to the high complexity involved in…
What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Tracking the pose of an object while it is being held and manipulated by a robot hand is difficult for vision-based methods due to significant occlusions. Prior works have explored using contact feedback and particle filters to localize…
Compression of soft bodies is central to biology, materials science, and robotics, yet existing contact theories break down at large deformations. Here, we develop a general framework for soft-body compression by extending the method of…