12 accepted papers
Dexterous manipulation is limited by both control and design, without consensus as to what makes manipulators best for performing dexterous tasks. This raises a fundamental challenge: how should we design and control robot manipulators that are optimized for dexterity? We present a co-design framewo…
Soft robots offer considerable advantages relative to traditional, rigid robots, including: versatility, safety, and rich dynamic behavior. A common approach for actuating soft robots is to use pumps and valves to control pressures and flow rates through fluidic channels embedded in a soft material,
Soft robotic hands promise to provide compliant and safe interaction with objects and environments. However, designing soft hands to be both compliant and functional across diverse use cases remains challenging. Although co-design of hardware and control better couples morphology to behavior, the re…
In this paper we explore kinematics ranging from anguilliform to thunniform achieved in a self-sensing multi-degree-of-freedom soft robotic fish and analyze the effect of them on the swimming. First, we examine the characteristics of the bending actuators of the robotic fish. Then, we express the ki
For robot manipulation, both the controller and end-effector design are crucial. Compared with rigid grippers, soft grippers are more generalizable by deforming to different geometries, but designing such a gripper and finding its grasp pose remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a co-design…
Existing robots designed for locomotion in granular media typically excel at a single purpose—either surface travel or subsurface digging—while lacking the ability to perform both within the same platform. In contrast, nature offers various examples of burrowing organisms that exhibit multi-function
Capturing large objects of unknown shape and orientation remains a challenge for most robotic grippers. We present a highly under-actuated gripper well suited for this task. Prior work shows two primary limitations to these grippers: the grip force of each link tends to decrease as the number of lin…
Soft robots have recently demonstrated impressive abilities to adapt to objects and their environment with limited sensing and actuation. However, mobile soft robots are typically fabricated using laborious molding processes that result in limited actuated degrees of freedom and hence limited locomo…
Robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in our society in forms where they are assisting or interacting with humans in a variety of environments, and thus they must have the ability to sense and detect objects by touch. An ongoing challenge for soft robots has been incorporating flexible sensors…
Fluidically actuated soft robots show a great promise for operation in sensitive and unknown environments due to their intrinsic compliance. However, most previous designs use either flow control systems that are noisy, inefficient, sensitive to leaks, and cannot achieve differential pressure (i.e.…
Large robotic collectives provide advantages such as resilience to mechanical failure of single agents and increased capabilities for search and coverage based applications. However, a lack of rapid and free-form manufacturing processes remains a barrier to high-volume fabrication of mechanically he…
Self-folding provides an efficient way of creating complex 3D geometries from 2D composites. However, the precision of self-folding structures is often limited by the use of open-loop folding mechanisms. In this paper we demonstrate feedback-controlled self-folding using a shape memory polymer and o…