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Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects (e.g., fruits/vegetables, internal organs, bottles/boxes) is critical for real-world applications such as food processing, robotic surgery, and household automation. However, developing grasp…

The control and task automation of robotic surgical system is very challenging, especially in soft tissue manipulation, due to the unpredictable deformations. Thus, an accurate simulator of soft tissues with the ability of interacting with…

Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…

Robotic dexterous in-hand manipulation, where multiple fingers dynamically make and break contact, represents a step toward human-like dexterity in real-world robotic applications. Unlike learning-based approaches that rely on large-scale…

Biomimetic and compliant robotic hands offer the potential for human-like dexterity, but controlling them is challenging due to high dimensionality, complex contact interactions, and uncertainties in state estimation. Sampling-based model…

Soft-growing robots (i.e., vine robots) are a promising class of soft robots that allow for navigation and growth in tightly confined environments. However, these robots remain challenging to model and control due to the complex interplay…

In recent years, soft robotics simulators have evolved to offer various functionalities, including the simulation of different material types (e.g., elastic, hyper-elastic) and actuation methods (e.g., pneumatic, cable-driven, servomotor).…

Autonomous lander missions on extraterrestrial bodies will need to sample granular material while coping with domain shift, no matter how well a sampling strategy is tuned on Earth. This paper proposes an adaptive scooping strategy that…

Caging is a promising tool which allows a robot to manipulate an object without directly reasoning about the contact dynamics involved. Furthermore, caging also provides useful guarantees in terms of robustness to uncertainty, and often…

Robots are increasingly envisioned as human companions, assisting with everyday tasks that often involve manipulating deformable objects. Although recent advances in robotic hardware and embodied AI have expanded their capabilities, current…

The robotic shape control of deformable linear objects has garnered increasing interest within the robotics community. Despite recent progress, the majority of shape control approaches can be classified into two main groups: open-loop…

Soft robotics focuses on designing robots with highly deformable materials, allowing them to adapt and operate safely and reliably in unstructured and variable environments. While soft robots offer increased compliance over rigid body…

Robot arms with lighter weight can reduce unnecessary energy consumption which is desirable in robotic industry. However, lightweight arms undergo undesirable elastic deformation. In this paper, the planar motion of a lightweight flexible…

Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…

There is a growing need for soft robotic platforms that perform gentle, precise handling of a wide variety of objects. Existing surface-based manipulation systems, however, lack the compliance and tactile feedback needed for delicate…

Many manipulation tasks require the robot to control the contact between a grasped compliant tool and the environment, e.g. scraping a frying pan with a spatula. However, modeling tool-environment interaction is difficult, especially when…

Robot manipulation of rope-like objects is an interesting problem that has some critical applications, such as autonomous robotic suturing. Solving for and controlling rope is difficult due to the complexity of rope physics and the…

Manipulating deformable objects arises in daily life and numerous applications. Despite phenomenal advances in industrial robotics, manipulation of deformable objects remains mostly a manual task. This is because of the high number of…

Gradient-based methods can efficiently optimize controllers by leveraging differentiable simulation and physical priors. However, contact-rich manipulation remains challenging because hybrid contact dynamics often produce discontinuous or…

This paper is concerned with the problem of estimating (interpolating and smoothing) the shape (pose and the six modes of deformation) of a slender flexible body from multiple camera measurements. This problem is important in both biology,…