13 accepted papers
Wall-climbing robots capable of scaling vertical surfaces could help automate hazardous or labor intensive tasks such as window washing, inspection, maintenance, and construction. Active adhesion methods achieve higher payload capacities, but require power to maintain their grip. Passive adhesion de…
Fluid-driven soft robots promise high-dimensional motion and cost-effective scalability, but their performance is constrained by the limited flow capacity of compact solenoid valves and the integration challenges of large membrane valves. This paper introduces a modular hybrid valve architecture tha…
Industrial robotics emphasizes the development of collaborative robots (co-bots) designed to work safely alongside human operators. To minimize the risk of injury during physical human-robot interactions (pHRI), it is common to incorporate compliance into the joints or links of robotic manipulators.
Soft robotic systems are inherently compliant, giving them unique capabilities not possessed by traditional rigid-bodied robot systems. Many soft systems rely on soft pneumatic actuators. One of the biggest downsides of such actuators is the need for bulky pressure-regulating devices and individual…
Proprioception, or the perception of the configuration of one's body, is challenging to achieve with soft robots due to their infinite degrees of freedom and incompatibility with most off-the-shelf sensors. This work explores the use of inertial measurement units (IMUs), sensors that output orientat…
McKibben artificial muscles, comprised of an expandable bladder wrapped in a double-helix-braided sheath, have the ability to generate forces without restricting motion to occur exclusively along the direction of actuation. This makes them attractive for a variety of applications including soft, wea
Nonlinear dynamical systems can be made easier to control by lifting them into the space of observable functions, where their evolution is described by the linear Koopman operator. This letter describes how the Koopman operator can be used to generate approximate linear, bilinear, and nonlinear mode
Controlling soft continuum manipulator arms is difficult due to their infinite degrees of freedom, nonlinear material properties, and large deflections under loading. This letter presents a data-driven approach to identifying soft manipulator models that enables consistent control under variable loa
This paper presents a soft-robotic platform for exploring the ecological relevance of non-locomotory movements via animal-robot interactions. Coral snakes (genus Micrurus) and their mimics use vigorous, non-locomotory, and arrhythmic thrashing to deter predation. There is variation across snake spec…
Controlling soft robots with precision is a challenge due in large part to the difficulty of constructing models that are amenable to model-based control design techniques. Koopman operator theory offers a way to construct explicit linear dynamical models of soft robots and to control them using est…
Soft robots are challenging to model due in large part to the nonlinear properties of soft materials. Fortunately, this softness makes it possible to safely observe their behavior under random control inputs, making them amenable to large-scale data collection and system identification. This paper i…
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…