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Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
Dexterous robotic hands often struggle to generalize effectively in complex environments due to the limitations of models trained on low-diversity data. However, the real world presents an inherently unbounded range of scenarios, making it…
In robots, nonprehensile manipulation operations such as pushing are a useful way of moving large, heavy or unwieldy objects, moving multiple objects at once, or reducing uncertainty in the location or pose of objects. In this study, we…
Simulating deformable objects under rich interactions remains a fundamental challenge for real-to-sim robot manipulation, with dynamics jointly driven by environmental effects and robot actions. Existing simulators rely on predefined…
Robotic automation is accelerating scientific discovery by reducing manual effort in laboratory workflows. However, precise manipulation of powders remains challenging, particularly in tasks such as transport that demand accuracy and…
Evolutionary robotics aims to automatically design autonomous adaptive morphological robots that can evolve to accomplish a specific task while adapting to environmental changes. Soft robotics have demonstrated the feasibility of…
Currently, manipulation tasks for deformable objects often focus on activities like folding clothes, handling ropes, and manipulating bags. However, research on contact-rich tasks involving deformable objects remains relatively…
The strength of the human hand lies in its ability to manipulate small objects precisely and robustly. In contrast, simple robotic grippers have low dexterity and fail to handle small objects effectively. This is why many automation tasks…
Despite advances in dexterous hand manipulation, robotic hand design is still largely decoupled from task-driven evaluation and control, limiting systematic optimization. Existing robotic hand co-design approaches are often limited in…
Tactile sensing allows robots to gather detailed geometric information about objects through physical interaction, complementing vision-based approaches. However, efficiently acquiring useful tactile data remains challenging due to the…
The complex physical properties of highly deformable materials such as clothes pose significant challenges fanipulation systems. We present a novel visual feedback dictionary-based method for manipulating defoor autonomous robotic mrmable…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Robotic grasping requires safe force interaction to prevent a grasped object from being damaged or slipping out of the hand. In this vein, this paper proposes an integrated framework for grasping with formal safety guarantees based on…
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects remains a challenging task. One such task is folding a garment autonomously. Given start and end folding positions, what is an optimal trajectory to move the robotic arm to fold a garment? Certain…
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…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of contact models on contact-implicit trajectory optimization for manipulation. We consider three different approaches: (1) a contact model that is based on complementarity constraints, (2) a smooth…
In this paper, we propose a novel vision-based control algorithm for regulating the whole body shape of extensible multisection soft continuum manipulators. Contrary to existing vision-based control algorithms in the literature that…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…