11 accepted papers
Soft robots show significant potential for use in search and rescue, human-robot interaction, and other emerging fields due to their ability to easily conform, deform, and interact with their environment. However, precise control of these soft robots is still being explored. In this letter, we inves
Tree fruit growers around the world are facing labor shortages for critical operations, including harvest and pruning. There is a great interest in developing robotic solutions for these labor-intensive tasks, but current efforts have been prohibitively costly, slow, or require a reconfiguration of…
Pneumatically operated soft growing robots that extend via tip eversion are well-suited for navigation in confined spaces. Adding the ability to interact with the environment using sensors and tools attached to the robot tip would greatly enhance the usefulness of these robots for exploration in the…
Soft growing robots are proposed for use in applications such as complex manipulation tasks or navigation in disaster scenarios. Safe interaction and ease of production promote the usage of this technology, but soft robots can be challenging to teleoperate due to their unique degrees of freedom. In…
Haptic devices use touch to enable communication in a salient and private manner. While most haptic devices are held or worn at the hand, there is recent interest in developing wearable haptic devices for the arms. This frees the hands for manipulation tasks, but creates challenges for wearability.
Snake robots offer a useful and unique mobility platform for search-and-rescue applications. However, existing prototypes made of rigid links and joints are hampered by a lack of flexibility that limits their utility in highly cluttered, maze-like environments, and their heavy weight limits their en
Soft pneumatic actuators enable robots to interact safely with complex environments, but often suffer from imprecise control and unpredictable dynamics. This letter addresses these challenges through the use of model reference adaptive control, which modulates the input to the plant to ensure that i
This paper presents an origami-inspired cable-driven continuum manipulator module that offers low-cost, low-volume deployment, light weight, and inherently safe human interaction and collaboration. Each module has a mass of around 110 g and integrates the actuation, sensing, and control sub-systems…
Soft robotics carries the promise of making robots as capable and adaptable as biological creatures, but this will not be possible without the ability to perform self-sensing and control with precision and repeatability. In this paper, we seek to address this need with the development of a new pneum
Soft pneumatic actuators can allow robotic manipulators to interact safely in complex environments in close proximity to humans, but work still needs to be done controlling them more effectively. We explore this area by introducing a 2-degree of freedom (DoF) universal joint module actuated by three
Soft pneumatic actuators provide many exciting properties, but controlling them without the use of bulky and expensive flow-control valves can be difficult and computationally expensive. We seek a solution to this problem by introducing an inexpensive and reliable muscle-like linear soft actuator us…