14 accepted papers
Robotic grippers aim to replicate the remarkable functionalities of the human hand by providing advanced perception, adaptability, stability, and dexterity for complex tasks. Achieving these capabilities demands a sophisticated design hierarchy and robust perception mechanisms that ensure accurate m…
Addressing the critical trade-off between compliance and grasping force in underwater manipulation, this letter presents a novel topology optimization framework to automate the design of soft, variable-stiffness fingers from a single material. By employing multiple load cases within the optimization
We introduce asRoBallet, to the best of our knowledge, the first successful deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) on a humanoid ballbot hardware. Historically, ballbots have served as a canonical benchmark for underactuated and nonholonomic control, which are characterized by a reality gap in co…
Robotic grippers aim to replicate the remarkable functionalities of the human hand by providing advanced perception, adaptability, stability, and dexterity for complex tasks. Achieving these capabilities demands a sophisticated design hierarchy and robust perception mechanisms that ensure accurate m
In this letter, we propose a novel framework for tactile-based dexterous manipulation learning with a blind anthropomorphic robotic hand, i.e. without visual sensing. First, object-related states were extracted from the raw tactile signals by a graph-based perception model - TacGNN. The resulting ta
Tactile sensors of high spatial resolution can provide rich contact information in terms of accurate contact location and force magnitude for robots. However, achieving a high spatial resolution normally requires a high density of tactile sensing cells (or taxels), which will inevitably lead to crow
Planar mechanisms dominate modern designs of legged robots with remote actuator placement for robust agility in ground mobility. This paper presents a novel design of robotic leg modules using the Bennett linkage, driven by two coaxially arranged quasi-direct actuators capable of omnidirectional gro…
This letter presents a novel design of a soft tactile finger with omni-directional adaptation using multi-channel optical fibers for rigid-soft interactive grasping. Machine learning methods are used to train a model for real-time prediction of force, torque, and contact using the tactile data colle
This paper explores the feasibility of learning robot force control and interaction using soft metamaterial and machine vision. We start by investigating the differential stiffness of a hollow, cone-shaped, 3D metamaterial made from soft rubber, achieving a large stiffness ratio between the axial an…
Soft robots often show a superior power-to-weight ratio using highly compliant, light-weight material, which leverages various bio-inspired body designs to generate desirable deformations for life-like motions. In this letter, given that most material used for soft robots is light-weight in general,
The engineering design of robotic grippers presents an ample design space for optimization towards robust grasping. In this letter, we investigate how learning method can be used to support the design reconfiguration of robotic grippers for grasping using a novel soft structure with omni-directional
Robot learning is widely accepted by academia and industry with its potentials to transform autonomous robot control through machine learning. Inspired by widely used soft fingers on grasping, we propose a method of rigid-soft interactive learning, aiming at reducing the time of data collection. In
This paper presents preliminary results of the design, development, and evaluation of a hand rehabilitation glove fabricated using lobster-inspired hybrid design with rigid and soft components for actuation. Inspired by the bending abdomen of lobsters, hybrid actuators are built with serially jointe…
Classical rigid-bodied robotic systems are presented with proven success in theoretical development and industrial applications, are recently challenged by the emergence of soft robotics due to a growing need in physical human-robot interactions (pHRI), such as wearable devices, medical robots, pers…