Climate change, invasive species and human activities are currently damaging the world's coral reefs at unprecedented rates, threatening their vast biodiversity and fisheries, and reducing coastal protection. Solving this vast challenge requires scalable coral regeneration technologies that can breed climate-resilient species and accelerate the natural regrowth processes; actions that are impeded by the absence of safe and robust tools to handle the fragile coral. We investigate ReefFlex, a generative soft finger design methodology that explores a diverse space of soft fingers to produce a set of candidates capable of safely grasping fragile and geometrically heterogeneous coral in a cluttered environment. Our key insight is encoding heterogeneous grasping into a reduced set of motion primitives, creating a simplified, tractable multi-objective optimisation problem. To evaluate the method, we design a soft robot for reef rehabilitation, which grows and manipulates coral in onshore aquaculture facilities for future reef out-planting. We demonstrate ReefFlex increases both grasp success and grasp quality (disturbance resistance, positioning accuracy) and reduces in adverse events encountered during coral manipulation compared to reference designs. ReefFlex, offers a generalisable method to design soft end-effectors for complex handling and paves a pathway towards automation in previously unachievable domains like coral handling for restoration.
TouchDrive: Electronics-Free Tactile Sensing Interface for Assistive Grasping
Division of Microsystems Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering（微系统技术部门）；Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, Department of Information Technology（网络物理系统实验室）
Regulating contact forces with high precision is crucial for grasping and manipulating fragile or deformable objects. We aim to utilize the dexterity of human hands to regulate the contact forces for robotic hands and exploit human sensory-motor synergies in a wearable and non-invasive way. We extracted force information from the electric activities of skeletal muscles during their voluntary contractions through surface electromyography (sEMG). We built a regression model based on a Neural Network to predict the gripping force from the preprocessed sEMG signals and achieved high accuracy (R2 =…
Agentic AI for Robot Control: Flexible but still Fragile
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（智能系统马克斯·普朗克研究所）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））
VILAS: A VLA-Integrated Low-cost Architecture with Soft Grasping for Robotic Manipulation
Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学）；Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center（弗吉尼亚海鲜农业研究与推广中心）；Amazon Store Foundation AI (SFAI)（亚马逊商店基金会人工智能（SFAI））
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
We present stress-minimizing (SM) metric, a new metric of grasp qualities. Unlike previous metrics that ignore the material of target objects, we assume that target objects are made of homogeneous isotopic materials. SM metric measures the maximal resistible external wrenches without causing fracture in the target objects. Therefore, SM metric is useful for robot grasping valuable and fragile objects. In this paper, we analyze the properties of this new metric, propose grasp planning algorithms to generate globally optimal grasps maximizing the SM metric, and compare the performance of the SM …
Adaptive and Multi-object Grasping via Deformable Origami Modules
Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) centre（新加坡-麻省理工联合研究与技术中心）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore（国立新加坡大学机械工程系）
Learning Gentle Grasping Using Vision, Sound, and Touch
Learning, Adaptive Systems, and Robotics (LASR) Lab, TU Dresden（图腾德斯登技术大学学习、自适应系统与机器人实验室）；Center for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI)（人机协同触觉互联网中心）
Everything-Grasping (EG) Gripper: A Universal Gripper with Synergistic Suction-Grasping Capabilities for Cross-Scale and Cross-State Manipulation
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校机械工程系）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学生物医学工程系）；Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学机械与自动化工程系）；Multi-scale Medical Robotics Center, Hong Kong, China（香港医学机器人多尺度中心）；Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Purdue University（普渡大学农业与生物工程系）
University of California at Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）
Dexterous multi-fingered hands can accomplish fine manipulation behaviors that are infeasible with simple robotic grippers. However, sophisticated multi-fingered hands are often expensive and fragile. Low-cost soft hands offer an appealing alternative to more conventional devices, but present considerable challenges in sensing and actuation, making them difficult to apply to more complex manipulation tasks. In this paper, we describe an approach to learning from demonstration that can be used to train soft robotic hands to perform dexterous manipulation tasks. Our method uses object-centric de…
Grasping Deformable Objects via Reinforcement Learning with Cross-Modal Attention to Visuo-Tactile Inputs
Dept. of Electronic Engineering at Sogang University（ソガン大学电子工程系）；Dept. of Immersive Media and Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University（顺天大学沉浸媒体与工程系）；College of Medicine, Yonsei University（延世大学医学院）
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；California NanoSystems Institute（加州纳米系统研究所）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）
A key challenge in robotics is to create efficient methods for grasping objects with diverse shapes, sizes, poses, and properties. Grasping with hand-like end effectors often requires careful selection of hand orientation and finger placement. Here, we present a soft, fingerless gripper capable of efficiently generating multiple grasping modes. It is based on a soft, cylindrical accordion structure containing coupled, parallel fluidic channels. It is controlled via pressure supplied from a single fluidic port. Inflation opens the gripper orifice for enveloping an object, while deflation allows…
Robust Adaptive Safe Robotic Grasping with Tactile Sensing
Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark（马士基麦金尼默勒研究所，丹麦南方大学）；Departments of Mechanical and Civil Engineering and Computing and Mathematical Sciences , California Institute of Technology（机械与土木工程系和计算与数学科学系，加州理工学院）
ALPHA-$α$ and Bi-ACT Are All You Need: Importance of Position and Force Information/Control for Imitation Learning of Unimanual and Bimanual Robotic Manipulation with Low-Cost System
Osaka University（大阪大学）；Graduate School of Information Science and Technology of Osaka University（大阪大学信息科学与技术研究生院）；School of Engineering Science, Osaka University（大阪大学工程科学学院）
Peking University（北京大学）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Fontys University of Applied Sciences（方提斯应用科学大学）
Novel robotic grippers have captured increasing interests recently because of their abilities to adapt to varieties of circumstances and their powerful functionalities. Differing from traditional gripper with mechanical components-made fingers, novel robotic grippers are typically made of novel structures and materials, using a novel manufacturing process. In this paper, a novel robotic gripper with external frame and internal thermoplastic elastomer belt-made net is proposed. The gripper grasps objects using the friction between the net and objects. It has the ability of adaptive gripping thr…
Hybrid Soft Electrostatic Metamaterial Gripper for Multi-surface, Multi-object Adaptation
Empa - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology（瑞士联邦材料科学与技术实验室（Empa））；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)（英联邦科学与工业研究组织（CSIRO））
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou)（南方海洋科学与工程广东省实验室（广州））
Soft actuators have shown great advantages in compliance and morphology matched for manipulation of delicate objects and inspection in a confined space. There is an unmet need for a soft actuator that can provide torsional motion to e.g. enlarge working space and increase degrees of freedom. Towards this goal, we present origami-inspired soft pneumatic actuators (OSPAs) made from silicone. The prototype can output a rotation of more than one revolution (up to 435°), more significant than its counterparts. Its rotation ratio (=rotation angle/ aspect ratio) is more than 136°, about twice the lar…
Current anthropomorphic robotic hands mainly focus on improving their dexterity by devising new mechanical structures and actuation systems. However, most of them rely on a single structure/system (e.g., bone-only) and ignore the fact that the human hand is composed of multiple functional structures (e.g., skin, bones, muscles, and tendons). This not only increases the difficulty of the design process but also lowers the robustness and flexibility of the fabricated hand. Besides, other factors like customization, the time and cost for production, and the degree of resemblance between human han…
