Publications associées à Ori-Pixel, a Multi-DoFs Origami Pixel for Modular Reconfigurable Surfaces

Aggregating Spatial and Photometric Context for Photometric Stereo

Photometric stereo, a computer vision technique for estimating the 3D shape of objects through images captured under varying illumination conditions, has been a topic of research for nearly four decades. In its general formulation, photometric stereo is an ...

EPFL2024

Soft Robotics: A Route to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in Robotics

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes

Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Frequency response of fiber reinforced DEAs

Yves Perriard, Yoan René Cyrille Civet, Thomas Guillaume Martinez, Stefania Maria Aliki Konstantinidi, Markus Koenigsdorff

Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) have emerged as versatile and promising devices for a multitude of applications, including soft robotics, haptic interfaces, and artificial muscles. DEAs are an interesting soft actuator technology due to their high en ...

Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)2024

Edible Soft Actuators based on Konjac Glucomannan for Underwater Operation

Dario Floreano, Jun Shintake, Ryo Kanno, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst

Soft robots are being increasingly developed and deployed for underwater applications such as exploration, monitoring, and rescue owing to their innate compliance, mechanical and chemical stability, and waterproof properties. However, they are still predom ...

2024

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

A Stable Adaptive Extended Kalman Filter for Estimating Robot Manipulators Link Velocity and Acceleration

Aude Billard, Harshit Khurana

One can estimate the velocity and acceleration of robot manipulators by utilizing nonlinear observers. This involves combining inertial measurement units (IMUs) with the motor encoders of the robot through a model-based sensor fusion technique. This approa ...

IEEE2023

Morphological flexibility in robotic systems through physical polygon meshing

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Shape-changing robots adapt their own morphology to address a wider range of functions or environments than is possible with a fixed or rigid structure. Akin to biological organisms, the ability to alter shape or configuration emerges from the underlying m ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Bimanual dynamic grabbing and tossing of objects onto a moving target

Aude Billard, Michael Bosongo Bombile

Bimanual grabbing and tossing of packages onto trays or conveyor belts remains a human activity in the industry. For robots, such a dynamic task requires coordination between two arms and fast adaptation abilities when the tossing target is moving and subj ...

Elsevier2023

Smell Driven Navigation for Soft Robotic Arms: Artificial Nose and Control

Egidio Falotico, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Elephants and other animals heavily rely on the sense of smell to operate. Soft robots would also benefit from an artificial sense of smell, which could be helpful in typical soft robotic tasks such as search and rescue, pipe inspection, and all the tasks ...

IEEE2023

The science of soft robot design: A review of motivations, methods and enabling technologies

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Novel technologies, fabrication methods, controllers and computational methods are rapidly advancing the capabilities of soft robotics. This is creating the need for design techniques and methodologies that are suited for the multi-disciplinary nature of s ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Self-Correcting Quadratic Programming-Based Robot Control

Aude Billard, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Farshad Khadivar

Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...

2023

A Provably Stable Iterative Learning Controller for Continuum Soft Robots

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Fully exploiting soft robots' capabilities requires devising strategies that can accurately control their movements with the limited amount of control sources available. This task is challenging for reasons including the hard-to-model dynamics, the system' ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Sensorless force and displacement estimation in soft actuators

Jamie Paik, Sagar Dattatray Joshi

Sensing forms an integral part of soft matter based robots due to their compliance, dependence on loading conditions, and virtually infinite degrees of freedom. Previous studies have developed several extrinsic sensors and embedded them into soft actuators ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Identifying important sensory feedback for learning locomotion skills

Auke Ijspeert, Milad Shafiee Ashtiani, Guillaume Denis Antoine Bellegarda

Robot motor skills can be acquired by deep reinforcement learning as neural networks to reflect state-action mapping. The selection of states has been demonstrated to be crucial for successful robot motor learning. However, because of the complexity of neu ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Gazebo Fluids: SPH-based simulation of fluid interaction with articulated rigid body dynamics

Auke Ijspeert, Jonathan Patrick Arreguit O'Neill, Wei Wang, Emmanouil Angelidis

Physical simulation is an indispensable component of robotics simulation platforms that serves as the basis for a plethora of research directions. Looking strictly at robotics, the common characteristic of the most popular physics engines, such as ODE, DAR ...

IEEE2022

3PAC: A Plug-and-Play System for Distributed Power Sharing and Communication in Modular Robots

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft

In modular robotics, there is classically a compromise between coupling complexity and functionality. The mechanical and electrical designs are linked, such that adding electrical features often requires redesigning the mechanical components. However, incr ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Hybrid Wireless-Local Communication via Information Propagation for Modular Robotic Synchronization Applications

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Modular robots hold promise of adaptability, robustness, and versatility. Synchronization of modules is critical; if a module is asynchronous, not only will the robot fail to perform tasks properly, but its behavior may be self-destructive through self-col ...

WILEY2022

Design considerations for robotically assembled through-tenon timber joints

Pierre Latteur, Yves Weinand, Julien Gamerro, Nicolas Henry Pierre Louis Rogeau

This research investigates the robotic assembly of timber structures connected by wood–wood connections. As the digitization of the timber construction sector progresses, digital tools, such as industrial robotic arms and Computer Numerical Control machine ...

2022

Advancing coordination control of multi-limb robotic tasks: application to bimanual dynamic manipulation and bipedal reactive locomotion

Michael Bosongo Bombile

Bi-manual picking up of objects to toss them on a conveyor belt are dynamic manipulation activities generated daily in the industry. Such repetitive and physically demanding tasks are still done largely by humans for lack of similarly fast, precise, and ro ...

EPFL2022

Enhancing our understanding of human fine manipulation skills and advancing robot dexterity in grasping

Kunpeng Yao

From surgery to watchmaking, fine-manipulation skills highly rely on the dexterity afforded by both hands. Coordination is key to human dexterity. Specifically, humans need not only to govern the abundant intrinsic degrees of freedom (DOFs) to allocate con ...

EPFL2022