4 accepted papers
Monitoring the state of contact is essential for robotic devices, especially grippers that implement geckoinspired adhesives where intimate contact is crucial for a firm attachment. However, due to the lack of deformable sensors, few have demonstrated tactile sensing for gecko grippers. We present V…
The widespread use of fluidic actuation for soft robots creates a high demand for soft pumps and compressors. However, current off-the-shelf pumps are usually rigid, noisy, and cumbersome. As a result, it is hard to integrate most commercial pumps into soft robotic systems, which restricts the auton…
This article describes an innovative design of variable stiffness soft actuator, which can potentially be utilized for manipulation and locomotion of soft robots. The new actuator is a combination of two types of actuations: soft pneumatic actuation and muscle-like supercoiled polymer (SCP) actuatio…
Retrieving rich contact information from robotic tactile sensing has been a challenging, yet significant task for the effective perception of object properties that the robot interacts with. This letter is dedicated to developing an algorithm to estimate contact force and torque for vision-based tac