Related papers: Simulation-Driven Evolutionary Motion Parameteriza…
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…
This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and…
Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…
Soft slender robots have attracted more and more research attentions in these years due to their continuity and compliance natures. However, mechanics modeling for soft robots interacting with environment is still an academic challenge…
Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…
Soft robotic hands promise to provide compliant and safe interaction with objects and environments. However, designing soft hands to be both compliant and functional across diverse use cases remains challenging. Although co-design of…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Machines that mimic humans have inspired scientists for centuries. Bio-inspired soft robotic hands are a good example of such an endeavor, featuring intrinsic material compliance and continuous motion to deal with uncertainty and adapt to…
Robotic manipulation of highly deformable cloth presents a promising opportunity to assist people with several daily tasks, such as washing dishes; folding laundry; or dressing, bathing, and hygiene assistance for individuals with severe…
Morphological regeneration is an important feature that highlights the environmental adaptive capacity of biological systems. Lack of this regenerative capacity significantly limits the resilience of machines and the environments they can…
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…
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
This thesis presents a unified modeling and simulation framework for analyzing sidewinding and tumbling locomotion of the COBRA snake robot across rigid, compliant, and granular terrains. A contact-implicit formulation is used to model…
Existing shape estimation methods for deformable object manipulation suffer from the drawbacks of being off-line, model dependent, noise-sensitive or occlusion-sensitive, and thus are not appropriate for manipulation tasks requiring high…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Tree fruit growers around the world are facing labor shortages for critical operations, including harvest and pruning. There is a great interest in developing robotic solutions for these labor-intensive tasks, but current efforts have been…
In recent years, there has been a significant effort dedicated to developing efficient, robust, and general human-to-robot handover systems. However, the area of flexible handover in the context of complex and continuous objects' motion…
Shape control of deformable objects is a challenging and important robotic problem. This paper proposes a model-free controller using novel 3D global deformation features based on modal analysis. Unlike most existing controllers using…
Simulating soft robots in cluttered environments remains an open problem due to the challenge of capturing complex dynamics and interactions with the environment. Furthermore, fast simulation is desired for quickly exploring robot behaviors…