12 papers
Pneumatic neurons for soft robots enable inflate-and-fire networks for rhythmic motion
Dongting Li, Michael Tolley, Nick Gravish
Animals coordinate their movements through distributed neural circuits, but soft robots still typically depend on external, centralized electronics for control. Building soft robot…
Pneumatic Units for Logic-based Sequential Excitation (PULSE) in Wearable Haptic Devices
Jessica Healey, Anoush Sepehri, Michael T. Tolley +1
Soft, wearable robotic devices can deliver haptic feedback to support a wide range of tasks, such as extended reality, training various skills, and rehabilitation. Pneumatic actuat…
A Task-Agnostic Control Strategy for Dynamic Assistance with Pneumatically Actuated Soft Exosuits
Anoush Sepehri, Zachary Huang, Raymond de Callafon +2
Pneumatic artificial muscles have provided new opportunities to develop upper-extremity soft exosuits for reha- bilitation, augmentation, and assisted daily living. However, the co…
Real-time Estimator of Actuator Control and Health (REACH) on an Eel-Inspired Soft Robot
Zhangjingyi Jiang, Myungsun Park, Michael T. Tolley +1
An actuator health estimation algorithm for a soft swimming robot that can perform anguilliform swimming is developed. Due to harsh operational environments of underwater robots, a…
Generating Robot Hands from Human Demonstrations
Sha Yi, Nicklas Hansen, Xueqian Bai +3
Robot learning has advanced rapidly in learning control, but learning the physical body of a robot remains much more difficult because jointly searching over design and control cre…
TacO: Benchmarking Tactile Sensors for Object Manipulation
Anya Zorin, Zilin Si, Myungsun Park +11
Vision-based learning from demonstrations has achieved remarkable success in enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks and high-level semantic reasoning, yet it remains insuffi…
Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence: Summary Report
Victoria A. Webster-Wood, Nicholas Gravish, Amir Alavi +37
This report provides a summary of the outcomes of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence held in 2024. Mechanical Intelligence (MI) represents the phenomenon tha…
House of Dextra: Cross-embodied Co-design for Dexterous Hands
Kehlani Fay, Darin Anthony Djapri, Anya Zorin +6
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 challen…
Dynamic Shape Control of Soft Robots Enabled by Data-Driven Model Reduction
Iman Adibnazari, Harsh Sharma, Myungsun Park +3
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller th…
Learning to Design Soft Hands using Reward Models
Xueqian Bai, Nicklas Hansen, Adabhav Singh +5
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…
Co-Design of Soft Gripper with Neural Physics
Sha Yi, Xueqian Bai, Adabhav Singh +3
For robot manipulation, both the controller and end-effector design are crucial. Soft grippers are generalizable by deforming to different geometries, but designing such a gripper…
Data-driven Model Reduction for Soft Robots via Lagrangian Operator Inference
Harsh Sharma, Iman Adibnazari, Jacobo Cervera-Torralba +2
Data-driven model reduction methods provide a nonintrusive way of constructing computationally efficient surrogates of high-fidelity models for real-time control of soft robots. Th…