8 accepted papers
Large-area tactile sensing remains a key challenge for wearable and robotic applications, where solutions must balance resolution and complexity, manufacturability, and conformability to various geometries. While acoustic waveguides have been used for contact localization and force estimation at the…
Soft fluidic actuators are becoming popular for their backdrivability, potential for high power density, and their support for power supply through flexible tubes. Control and design of such actuators requires serviceable models that describe how they relate fluid pressure and flow to mechanical for…
Though they are compliant, nimble and morpho-logically intelligent, fluidic soft robots often rely on bulky components for power and actuation. This work contributes a design methodology which enables development of soft fluidic robots that move in a sequenced fashion, enabling lightweight devices w…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of ``mechanical intelligence''---the ability to passively exhibit behaviors that would otherwise be dif…
Kirigami-patterned mechanisms are an emergent class of deployable structure that are easy to fabricate and offer the potential to be integrated into deployable robots. In this letter, we propose a design methodology for robotic kirigami structures that takes into consideration the deformation, loadi
Soft actuators with auxetic, or negative Poisson's ratio (NPR), behavior offer a way to create soft robots with novel kinematic behavior. This paper presents an original framework for reinforcement of a soft actuator using a generalized NPR element, called a Representative Auxetic Element (RAE), and…
The compliant structure of soft robotic systems enables a variety of novel capabilities in comparison to traditional rigid-bodied robots. A subclass of soft fluid-driven actuators known as fiber-reinforced elastomeric enclosures (FREEs) is particularly well suited as actuators for these types of sys
Fiber-Reinforced Elastofluidic Enclosures (FREEs), are a subset of pneumatic soft robots with an asymmetric continuously deformable skin that are able to generate a wide range of deformations and forces, including rotation and screw motions. Though these soft robots are able to generate a variety of…