Publications de Kai Christian Junge

Mod-VSA: A Modular Variable Stiffness Actuator for Multi-fingered Robotic Hands

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

Regulating contact forces is crucial for robotic manipulation, but achieving stiffness variation in multi-fingered hands is challenging due to design complexity. This work presents Mod-VSA, a modular variable stiffness actuator for multi-fingered tendon-dr ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2025

Soft Pneumatic Gripper With Interchangeable Fingertips by Using Reversible Polymers: The GraspBerry, a Raspberry Picking Case Study

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

Fingerprints primarily enhance grasping by modulating friction, as the surface pattern affects the friction needed for effective grasping and manipulation. A versatile gripper was developed with a more realistic distal phalange inspired by the human index ...

2025

Spatially distributed biomimetic compliance enables robust anthropomorphic robotic manipulation

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

The impressive capabilities of humans to robustly perform manipulation stems from compliant interactions, enabled by the structure and materials distributed in the hands. We propose that mimicking this spatially distributed compliance in an anthropomorphic ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Experimental assessment, design, and control of compliance in dexterous robotic hands

Kai Christian Junge

The ability to make compliant physical interactions enables robots to robustly contact with the environment. This plays a significant role in advancing robotic hands which must constantly interact with the world, often with large uncertainties and variatio ...

EPFL2025

Environmentally-Driven Morphogenesis of Reconfigurable Floating Structures using Markov Models

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

The morphology and structure play a crucial role in shaping the behavior and functionality of both biological and robotic systems. In this work, we are inspired by morphogenesis, a fundamental biological process that encompasses the emergence of organs and ...

IEEE2025

Soft robotics for farm to fork: applications in agriculture & farming

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

Agricultural tasks and environments range from harsh field conditions with semi-structured produce or animals, through to post-processing tasks in food-processing environments. From farm to fork, the development and application of soft robotics offers a pl ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Learning Motion Reconstruction from Demonstration via Multi-Modal Soft Tactile Sensing

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Kieran Daniel Gilday

Learning manipulation from demonstration is a key way for humans to teach complex tasks. However, this domain mainly focuses on kinetic teaching, and does not consider imitation of interaction forces which is essential for more contact rich tasks. We propo ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2024

Field-evaluated Closed Structure Soft Gripper Enhances the Shelf Life of Harvested Blackberries

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

Soft robotic grippers are intrinsically delicate while grasping objects, and can rely on mechanical deformation to adapt to different shapes without explicit control. These characteristics are particularly appealing for agriculture, where items of produce ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2024

Rapid Action Evaluation and Optimization Through Mutual Information Using a Multi-Modal Soft Tactile Sensor

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Kieran Daniel Gilday

The extraction of tactile information from an environment depends on the action, sensor design, and the environment itself. This makes identifying an optimal action for a given task, i.e. classification, challenging and typically requires extensive data-ri ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2024

Online Hydraulic Stiffness Modulation of a Soft Robotic Fish tail for Improved Thrust and Efficiency

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

This paper explores online stiffness modulation within a single tail stroke for swimming soft robots. Despite advances in stiffening mechanisms, little attention has been given to dynamically adjusting stiffness in real-time, presenting a challenge in deve ...

2024

Bio-Inspired Robotic Swallowing Simulator

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

The development of food products that are safe whilst also nutritious and sustainable is a key challenge for the food industry. However, evaluating the safety of food, and in particular swallowing safety, is a fundamental challenge to ensure safety, percep ...

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.2024

A multi-material robotic finger with integrated proprioceptive and tactile capabilities produced with a circular process

Antonia Georgopoulou Papadonikolaki, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

When developing or designing biomimetic robotic fingers with rigid and soft components and integrated sensors, fabrication is often a bottle-neck when assembling and casting processing techniques are used. This study introduces a thermoplastic multi-materi ...

IEEE2023

Exploration of the Design of Spiderweb-Inspired Structures for Vibration-Driven Sensing

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

In the quest to develop large-area soft sensors, we can look to nature for many examples. Spiderwebs show many fascinating properties that we can seek to understand and replicate in order to develop large-area, soft, and deformable sensing structures. Spid ...

2023

Lab2Field transfer of a robotic raspberry harvester enabled by a soft sensorized physical twin

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

Robotic fruit harvesting requires dexterity to handle delicate crops and development relying upon field testing possible only during the harvesting season. Here we focus on raspberry crops, and explore how the research methodology of harvesting robots can ...

2023

Exploring Dynamically Controlled Frisbee Throws Using a Highly Compliant Robotic Arm

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

2023

Control and Morphology Optimization of Passive Asymmetric Structures for Robotic Swimming

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Kamran Shakir, Andrea Vicari

Aquatic creatures exhibit remarkable adaptations of their body to efficiently interact with the surrounding fluid. The tight coupling between their morphology, motion, and the environment are highly complex but serves as a valuable example when creating bi ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Robotic automation and unsupervised cluster assisted modeling for solving the forward and reverse design problem of paper airplanes

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Stefan Ilic, Kai Christian Junge

Although often regarded a childhood toy, the design of paper airplanes is subtly complex. The design space and mapping from geometry to distance flown is highly nonlinear and probabilistic where a single airplane design exhibits a multitude of trajectory f ...

Nature Research2022

Leveraging Embodied Intelligence for Dexterous Robotic Manipulators Through Iterative Co-design

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

The role of embodied intelligence (EI) has the potential to overcome current limitations in the fabrication, control, and resulting behavior to create robust and effective dexterous robotic manipulators. To develop hands that truly exploit EI, we must desi ...

IOP Publishing2022

Scalable Fabrication and Actuation of a Human Inspired Hand Through 3D Printed Flexures and Combinatorial Actuation

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Carlo Bosio

The fabrication and control of robot hands with biologically inspired structure remains challenging due to its cost and complexity. In this paper we explore how widely available FDM printers can be used to fabricate complex hand structures by leveraging co ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Exploration of Human-Robot Collaboration Methods for Iterative Design Optimization of Paper Airplanes

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

To develop engineered systems with enhanced functionality, improving their design is essential. Robots and humans each have specialized competence advantageous to design. Robots excel in terms of fabrication reliability and observation of trends in data wh ...

Springer2022