5 papers
Zero-shot Whole-Body Manipulation with a Large-Scale Soft Robotic Torso via Guided Reinforcement Learning
Curtis C. Johnson, Carlo Alessi, Egidio Falotico +1
Whole-body manipulation is a powerful yet underexplored approach that enables robots to interact with large, heavy, or awkward objects using more than just their end-effectors. Sof…
Scaling Fabric-Based Piezoresistive Sensor Arrays for Whole-Body Tactile Sensing
Curtis C. Johnson, Daniel Webb, David Hill +1
Scaling tactile sensing for robust whole-body manipulation is a significant challenge, often limited by wiring complexity, data throughput, and system reliability. This paper prese…
Leveraging Passive Compliance of Soft Robotics for Physical Human-Robot Collaborative Manipulation
Dallin L. Cordon, Shaden Moss, Marc Killpack +1
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot con…
PneuDrive: An Embedded Pressure Control System and Modeling Toolkit for Large-Scale Soft Robots
Curtis C. Johnson, Daniel G. Cheney, Dallin L. Cordon +1
In this paper, we present a modular pressure control system called PneuDrive that can be used for large-scale, pneumatically-actuated soft robots. The design is particularly suited…
Baloo: A Large-Scale Hybrid Soft Robotic Torso for Whole-Arm Manipulation
Curtis C. Johnson, Andrew Clawson, Marc D. Killpack
Soft robotic actuators can simplify the design of controllers when operating in contact-rich environments. Importantly, their passive compliance fundamentally alters contact mechan…