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The robotic manipulation of composite rigid-deformable objects (i.e. those with mixed non-homogeneous stiffness properties) is a challenging problem with clear practical applications that, despite the recent progress in the field, it has…
This paper presents a shear-based control scheme for grasping and manipulating delicate objects with a Pisa/IIT anthropomorphic SoftHand equipped with soft biomimetic tactile sensors on all five fingertips. These `microTac' tactile sensors…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
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…
Tactile sensing in biological organisms is deeply intertwined with morphological form, such as human fingers, cat paws, and elephant trunks, which enables rich and adaptive interactions through a variety of geometrically complex structures.…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Performing long-term experimentation or large-scale data collection for machine learning in the field of soft robotics is challenging, due to the hardware robustness and experimental flexibility required. In this work, we propose a modular…
While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…
Traditional control methods effectively manage robot operations using models like motion equations but face challenges with issues of contact and friction, leading to unstable and imprecise controllers that often require manual tweaking.…
This paper aims to show that robots equipped with a vision-based tactile sensor can perform dynamic manipulation tasks without prior knowledge of all the physical attributes of the objects to be manipulated. For this purpose, a robotic…
Robotic-assisted surgery offers significant clinical advantages but largely eliminates direct haptic feedback, increasing the risk of excessive tool-tissue interaction forces. Although recent commercial systems have begun to introduce force…
Torque control algorithms which consider robot dynamics and contact constraints are important for creating dynamic behaviors for humanoids. As computational power increases, algorithms tend to also increase in complexity. However, it is not…
Contact-rich manipulation has become increasingly important in robot learning. However, previous studies on robot learning datasets have focused on rigid objects and underrepresented the diversity of pressure conditions for real-world…
Handheld grippers are increasingly used to collect human demonstrations due to their ease of deployment and versatility. However, most existing designs lack tactile sensing, despite the critical role of tactile feedback in precise…
Overcoming robotics challenges in the real world requires resilient control systems capable of handling a multitude of environments and unforeseen events. Evolutionary optimization using simulations is a promising way to automatically…
This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…
Autonomous lander missions on extraterrestrial bodies need to sample granular materials while coping with domain shifts, even when sampling strategies are extensively tuned on Earth. To tackle this challenge, this paper studies the few-shot…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…