Related papers: Towards artificial muscles
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…
Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Models for fluid deformable surfaces provide valid theories to describe the dynamics of thin fluidic sheets of soft materials. To use such models in morphogenesis and development requires to incorporate active forces. We consider active…
This paper is concerned with the long-time dynamical behavior of a piezoelectric system with magnetic effect, which has nonlinear damping terms and external forces with a parameter. At first, we use the nonlinear semigroup theory to prove…
Deformable object manipulation (DOM) is an emerging research problem in robotics. The ability to manipulate deformable objects endows robots with higher autonomy and promises new applications in the industrial, services, and healthcare…
Deformations of conventional solids are described via elasticity, a classical field theory whose form is constrained by translational and rotational symmetries. However, flexible metamaterials often contain an additional approximate…
We study the mechanical behavior of two-dimensional cellular tissues by formulating the continuum limit of discrete vertex models based on an energy that penalizes departures from a target area $A_0$ and a target perimeter $P_0$ for the…
Soft adhesive pads are needed for many robotics applications, and one approach is based on electroadhesion. Here we present a general analytic model and numerical results for electroadhesion for soft solids with arbitrary time-dependent…
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…
We have seen much recent progress in rigid object manipulation, but interaction with deformable objects has notably lagged behind. Due to the large configuration space of deformable objects, solutions using traditional modelling approaches…
Active materials are media for which deformations can occur in absence of loads, given an external stimulus. Two approaches to the modeling of such materials are mainly used in literature, both based on the introduction of a new tensor: an…
Muscles of the human body are composed of tiny actuators made up of myosin and actin filaments. They can exert force in various shapes such as curved or flat, under contact forces and deformations from the environment. On the other hand,…
Surgical procedures require a high level of technical skill to ensure efficiency and patient safety. Due to the direct effect of surgeon skill on patient outcomes, the development of cost-effective and realistic training methods is…
In analysing fluid forces on a moving body, a natural approach is to seek a component due to viscosity and an `inviscid' remainder. It is also attractive to decompose the velocity field into irrotational and rotational parts, and apportion…
Hard magnetic materials belong to a novel class of soft active materials with the capability of quick, large, and complex deformation via applying an external actuation. They have an extensive range of potential applications in soft robots,…
Tailoring the design of robot bodies for control purposes is implicitly performed by engineers, however, a methodology or set of tools is largely absent and optimization of morphology (shape, material properties of robot bodies, etc.) is…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Prosthetic hands can be used to support upper-body amputees. Myoelectric prosthesis, one of the externally-powered active prosthesis categories, requires proper processing units in addition to recording electrodes and instrumentation…