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Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
This paper presents volumetric homogenization, a spatially varying homogenization scheme for knitwear simulation. We are motivated by the observation that macro-scale fabric dynamics is strongly correlated with its underlying knitting…
One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…
In teleoperation of contact-rich manipulation tasks, selecting robot impedance is critical but difficult. The robot must be compliant to avoid damaging the environment, but stiff to remain responsive and to apply force when needed. In this…
Continuum robots, known for their high flexibility and adaptability, offer immense potential for applications such as medical surgery, confined-space inspections, and wearable devices. However, their non-linear elastic nature and complex…
Soft robots have drawn significant attention recently for their ability to achieve rich shapes when interacting with complex environments. However, their elasticity and flexibility compared to rigid robots also pose significant challenges…
Traditional robots have rigid links and structures that limit their ability to interact with the dynamics of their immediate environment. For example, conventional robot manipulators with rigid links can only manipulate objects using…
Living creatures and machines interact with the world through their morphology and motions. Recent advances in creating bio-inspired morphing robots and machines have led to the study of variable geometry truss (VGT), structures that can…
The current dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation involves two separate stages: manipulator design and control. Because the robot's morphology and how it can be controlled are intimately linked, joint optimization of design and control…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interactions with…
Mechanical metamaterials are artificial composites with tunable advanced mechanical properties. Particularly interesting types of mechanical metamaterials are flexible metamaterials, which harness internal rotations and instabilities to…
Task-driven design of soft robots requires models that are physically accurate and computationally efficient, while remaining transferable across actuator designs and task scenarios. However, existing modeling approaches typically face a…
We introduce a novel virtual robotic toolkit myGym, developed for reinforcement learning (RL), intrinsic motivation and imitation learning tasks trained in a 3D simulator. The trained tasks can then be easily transferred to real-world…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
In silico design and optimization of new materials primarily relies on high-accuracy atomic simulators that perform density functional theory (DFT) calculations. While recent works showcase the strong potential of machine learning to…
Achieving stable and robust perceptive locomotion for bipedal robots in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge due to complex terrain geometry and susceptibility to external disturbances. In this work, we propose a…
Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
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…
This paper introduces a new type of soft continuum robot, called SCoReS, which is capable of self-controlling continuously its curvature at the segment level; in contrast to previous designs which either require external forces or machine…