C. Della Santina
118 records found
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Robots operating alongside people, particularly in sensitive scenarios such as aiding the elderly with daily tasks or collaborating with workers in manufacturing, must guarantee safety and cultivate user trust. Continuum soft manipulators promise safety through material complian
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Dynamics-based control offers a promising approach to exploring the motion potential of soft robots. However, inherently infinite degrees of freedom of these systems pose significant challenges for dynamics modeling, closely followed by the pressing robustness concerns arising fr
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Motivated by the need for efficiency and robustness in repetitive robotic tasks such as locomotion, this study introduces the concept of Natural Motion Manifolds (NMMs) and presents a control method to stabilize and excite motions based on these structures. By considering the int
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Awareness in Robotics
An Early Perspective from the Viewpoint of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge “Awareness Inside”
While consciousness has been historically a heavily debated topic, awareness had less success in raising the interest of scholars. However, more and more researchers are getting interested in answering questions concerning what awareness is and how it can be artificially generate
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Human fingers exhibit remarkable dexterity and adaptability through a combination of structures with varying stiffness levels, ranging from soft tissues (low stiffness) to tendons and cartilage (medium stiffness) to bones (high stiffness). This paper focuses on the development of
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Soft robots promise inherent safety via their material compliance for seamless interactions with humans or delicate environments. Yet, their development is challenging because it requires integrating materials, geometry, actuation, and autonomy into complex mechatronic systems. D
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Stepping strategy, including step time and step location modulation, and hip strategy, i.e., upper-body movement, play crucial roles in achieving robust humanoid locomotion. However, exploiting these balance strategies in a unified and flexible manner has not been well addressed.
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SpikingSoft
A Spiking Neuron Controller for Bio-inspired Locomotion with Soft Snake Robots
Inspired by the dynamic coupling of moto-neurons and physical elasticity in animals, this work explores the possibility of generating locomotion gaits by utilizing physical oscillations in a soft snake by means of a low-level spiking neural mechanism. To achieve this goal, we int
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Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues have, however, shown their limitations;
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Learning from Interactive Demonstrations has revolutionized the way nonexpert humans teach robots. It is enough to kinesthetically move the robot around to teach pick-and-place, dressing, or cleaning policies. However, the main challenge is correctly generalizing to novel situati
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Curriculum-Based Reinforcement Learning for Quadrupedal Jumping
A Reference-Free Design
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising solution to mastering explosive and versatile quadrupedal jumping skills. However, current DRL-based frameworks usually rely on pre-existing reference trajectories obtained by capturing animal motions or transferring ex
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Quadrupedal animals show remarkable capabilities in traversing diverse terrains and display a range of behaviours and gait patterns. Achieving similar performance by exploiting the natural dynamics of the system is a key goal for robotics researchers. Here we show a bioinspired a
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People suffering from conditions affecting their activities of daily living and those who do straining repetitive tasks could be assisted using supportive devices. These devices have generally been stiff in design, with more recent advances exploring soft suits, removing the need
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Formulating the dynamics of continuously deformable objects and other mechanical systems analytically from first principles is an exceedingly challenging task, often impractical in real-world scenarios. What makes this challenge even harder to solve is that, usually, the object h
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While much work has been done recently in the realm of model-based control of soft robots and soft-rigid hybrids, most works examine robots that have an inherently serial structure. While these systems have been prevalent in the literature, there is an increasing trend toward des
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Soft robots enable safe and robust operations in unstructured environments. However, the nonlinearities of their continuum structure complicate the accomplishment of classic robotic tasks, such as pick and place. In this work, we propose the R-Soft Inverted Pendulum, a Soft Inver
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BerryTwist
A Twisting-Tube Soft Robotic Gripper for Blackberry Harvesting
As global demand for fruits and vegetables continues to rise, the agricultural industry faces significant challenges in securing adequate labor. Robotic harvesting devices offer a promising solution to address this issue. Harvesting delicate fruits, such as blackberries, presents
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We identify the nonlinear normal modes spawning from the stable equilibrium of a double pendulum under gravity, and we establish their connection to homoclinic orbits through the unstable upright position as energy increases. This result is exploited to devise an efficient swing-
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