14 citations · 50 across the 32 of their papers we have counts for
34 papers
Stabilizing Low-Stiffness Soft Robots at Unstable Equilibria: A Model-Based Optimal Control Approach
Nikhil Nair, Daniele Caradonna, Anup Teejo Mathew +3
Continuum soft robots are highly nonlinear and underactuated systems, which makes stabilizing them around unstable equilibrium points difficult. This challenge becomes even greater…
Collocated Shape Regulation for Soft Robots
Pietro Pustina, Ebrahim Shahabi, Daniel Feliu-Talegon +2
Controlling the shape of a continuum soft robot typically requires an accurate dynamic model and actuation of all degrees of freedom. We show that regulating only the actuated coor…
From Digital to Physical Reservoir Computing: Co-Optimizing Soft Robotic Reservoirs via Dynamics Matching
Nicola Visentin, Maximilian Stölzle, Mariano Ramírez Montero +3
Soft robotic substrates are promising for Physical Reservoir Computing (PRC) because their compliant nonlinear dynamics can provide temporal memory, high-dimensional state transfor…
SoRoMoX: Fast, Differentiable, and Parallelizable Soft Robot Models
Maximilian Stölzle, Solange Gribonval, Daniel Feliu-Talegon +9
Reduced-order models based on Cosserat-rod theory are now well established, and modeling theory is no longer the primary bottleneck in soft-robot control. Their implementations, ho…
A Model-Based Decoupling Strategy for Proprioception and Contact Sensing in an Architected Soft Manipulator
Francesco Stella, Annan Zhang, Cosimo Della Santina +2
Soft continuum robots require embedded sensing for proprioception and contact detection, yet integrating sensors into sparse, highly deformable architected structures remains chall…
Reconciling distributed compliance with high-performance control in continuum soft robotics
Vito Daniele Perfetta, Daniel Feliu-Talegon, Ebrahim Shahabi +1
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise arc…
Infinite-Dimensional Closed-Loop Inverse Kinematics for Soft Robots via Neural Operators
Carina Veil, Moritz Flaschel, Ellen Kuhl +1
For fully actuated rigid robots, kinematic inversion is a purely geometric problem, efficiently solved by closed-loop inverse kinematics (CLIK) schemes that compute joint velocitie…
SENSE-STEP: Learning Sim-to-Real Locomotion for a Sensory-Enabled Soft Quadruped Robot
Storm de Kam, Ebrahim Shahabi, Cosimo Della Santina
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, whil…
Segmenting the Complex and Irregular in Two-Phase Flows: A Real-World Empirical Study with SAM2
Semanur Küçük, Cosimo Della Santina, Angeliki Laskari
Segmenting gas bubbles in multiphase flows is a critical yet unsolved challenge in numerous industrial settings, from metallurgical processing to maritime drag reduction. Tradition…
Symbolic Learning of Interpretable Reduced-Order Models for Jumping Quadruped Robots
Gioele Buriani, Jingyue Liu, Maximilian Stölzle +2
Reduced-order models are central to motion planning and control of quadruped robots, yet existing templates are often hand-crafted for a specific locomotion modality. This motivate…
Learning to Move in Rhythm: Task-Conditioned Motion Policies with Orbital Stability Guarantees
Maximilian Stölzle, T. Konstantin Rusch, Zach J. Patterson +5
Learning from demonstration provides a sample-efficient approach to acquiring complex behaviors, enabling robots to move robustly, compliantly, and with fluidity. In this context,…
A Survey on Soft Robot Adaptability: Implementations, Applications, and Prospects
Zixi Chen, Di Wu, Qinghua Guan +8
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing…
Contact-Aware Safety in Soft Robots Using High-Order Control Barrier and Lyapunov Functions
Kiwan Wong, Maximilian Stölzle, Wei Xiao +3
Robots operating alongside people, particularly in sensitive scenarios such as aiding the elderly with daily tasks or collaborating with workers in manufacturing, must guarantee sa…
Soft yet Effective Robots via Holistic Co-Design
Maximilian Stölzle, Niccolò Pagliarani, Francesco Stella +6
Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Despite progress, the field struggles to balance t…
TamedPUMA: safe and stable imitation learning with geometric fabrics
Saray Bakker, Rodrigo Pérez-Dattari, Cosimo Della Santina +2
Using the language of dynamical systems, Imitation learning (IL) provides an intuitive and effective way of teaching stable task-space motions to robots with goal convergence. Yet,…
Explosive Jumping with Rigid and Articulated Soft Quadrupeds via Example Guided Reinforcement Learning
Georgios Apostolides, Wei Pan, Jens Kober +2
Achieving controlled jumping behaviour for a quadruped robot is a challenging task, especially when introducing passive compliance in mechanical design. This study addresses this c…
SpikingSoft: A Spiking Neuron Controller for Bio-inspired Locomotion with Soft Snake Robots
Chuhan Zhang, Cong Wang, Wei Pan +1
Inspired by the dynamic coupling of moto-neurons and physical elasticity in animals, this work explores the possibility of generating locomotion gaits by utilizing physical oscilla…
From Action Labels to Sets: Rethinking Action Supervision for Imitation Learning from Corrective Feedback
Zhaoting Li, Rodrigo Pérez-Dattari, Robert Babuska +2
Behavior cloning (BC) optimizes policies by treating human demonstrations as pointwise action labels. While effective with accurate action labels, this formulation is brittle in pr…
Real-Time Generation of Near-Minimum-Energy Trajectories via Constraint-Informed Residual Learning
Domenico Dona', Giovanni Franzese, Cosimo Della Santina +2
Industrial robotics demands significant energy to operate, making energy-reduction methodologies increasingly important. Strategies for planning minimum-energy trajectories typical…
Learning Low-Dimensional Strain Models of Soft Robots by Looking at the Evolution of Their Shape with Application to Model-Based Control
Ricardo Valadas, Maximilian Stölzle, Jingyue Liu +1
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing b…
Input-to-State Stable Coupled Oscillator Networks for Closed-form Model-based Control in Latent Space
Maximilian Stölzle, Cosimo Della Santina
Even though a variety of methods have been proposed in the literature, efficient and effective latent-space control (i.e., control in a learned low-dimensional space) of physical s…
Scalable Task Planning via Large Language Models and Structured World Representations
Rodrigo Pérez-Dattari, Zhaoting Li, Robert Babuška +2
Planning methods struggle with computational intractability in solving task-level problems in large-scale environments. This work explores leveraging the commonsense knowledge enco…
Design and Control of Modular Soft-Rigid Hybrid Manipulators with Self-Contact
Zach J. Patterson, Emily Sologuren, Cosimo Della Santina +1
Soft robotics focuses on designing robots with highly deformable materials, allowing them to adapt and operate safely and reliably in unstructured and variable environments. While…
Awareness in robotics: An early perspective from the viewpoint of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge "Awareness Inside''
Cosimo Della Santina, Carlos Hernandez Corbato, Burak Sisman +28
Consciousness has been historically a heavily debated topic in engineering, science, and philosophy. On the contrary, awareness had less success in raising the interest of scholars…