An overview of soft robotics

O Yasa, Y Toshimitsu, MY Michelis… - Annual Review of …, 2023 - annualreviews.org
Soft robots' flexibility and compliance give them the potential to outperform traditional rigid-
bodied robots while performing multiple tasks in unexpectedly changing environments and …

Design of soft robots: a review of methods and future opportunities for research

B Hasanshahi, L Cao, KY Song, W Zhang - Machines, 2024 - eprints.whiterose.ac.uk
Soft robots present resilient and adaptable systems characterized by deformable bodies
inspired by biological systems. In this paper, we comprehensively review existing design …

PreCo: Enhancing Generalization in Co-Design of Modular Soft Robots via Brain-Body Pre-Training

Y Wang, S Wu, T Zhang, Y Chang… - … on Robot Learning, 2023 - proceedings.mlr.press
Brain-body co-design, which involves the collaborative design of control strategies and
morphologies, has emerged as a promising approach to enhance a robot's adaptability to its …

Sim-to-real transfer of soft robotic navigation strategies that learns from the virtual eye-in-hand vision

J Lai, TA Ren, W Yue, S Su… - IEEE Transactions on …, 2023 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
To steer a soft robot precisely in an unconstructed environment with minimal collision
remains an open challenge for soft robots. When the environments are unknown, prior …

Sim-to-real of soft robots with learned residual physics

J Gao, MY Michelis, A Spielberg… - IEEE Robotics and …, 2024 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
Accurately modeling soft robots in simulation is computationally expensive and commonly
falls short of representing the real world. This well-known discrepancy, known as the sim-to …

Reinforcement learning enables real-time planning and control of agile maneuvers for soft robot arms

R Jitosho, TGW Lum, A Okamura… - Conference on Robot …, 2023 - proceedings.mlr.press
Control policies for soft robot arms typically assume quasi-static motion or require a hand-
designed motion plan. To achieve real-time planning and control for tasks requiring highly …

A deep learning framework for soft robots with synthetic data

S Sapai, JY Loo, ZY Ding, CP Tan, VM Baskaran… - Soft robotics, 2023 - liebertpub.com
Data-driven methods with deep neural networks demonstrate promising results for accurate
modeling in soft robots. However, deep neural network models rely on voluminous data in …

Fast aquatic swimmer optimization with differentiable projective dynamics and neural network hydrodynamic models

E Nava, JZ Zhang, MY Michelis, T Du… - International …, 2022 - proceedings.mlr.press
Aquatic locomotion is a classic fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem of interest to
biologists and engineers. Solving the fully coupled FSI equations for incompressible Navier …

Sim-to-real transfer of co-optimized soft robot crawlers

C Schaff, A Sedal, S Ni, MR Walter - Autonomous Robots, 2023 - Springer
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real
transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. Soft robots have “mechanical …

Aquarium: A fully differentiable fluid-structure interaction solver for robotics applications

JH Lee, MY Michelis, R Katzschmann… - … on Robotics and …, 2023 - ieeexplore.ieee.org
We present Aquarium, a differentiable fluid-structure interaction solver for robotics that offers
stable simulation, accurately coupled fluid-robot physics in two dimensions, and full …