THEME · Physical AI

Soft Robotics

Soft wrists, compliant control and variable stiffness — letting robots touch, fit and insert safely by giving way instead of fighting contact.

9 projects

TaMeSo-botRA-L 2026
Robust Object Insertion via Masked Encoding and Soft Wrist
A soft wrist collects safe tactile demos, and masked trajectory encoding retrieves them to insert unseen pegs at 85% success.
PHASEIROS 2026
Compliance-Enabled Tactile Phase Retrieval for Few-Shot Insertion Learning
A compliant wrist reveals insertion phases from touch, so phase-consistent retrieval lifts few-shot peg-in-hole success by 13 points.
CLAWRAL 2026
A Flexible Wrist with Anisotropic and Switchable Stiffness for Contact-Rich Manipulation
CLAW is a lightweight, low-cost flexible wrist that improves learned contact-rich manipulation through passive 6-DoF compliance and switchable anisotropic stiffness.
compliance-enabled-failure-recoveryICRA 2026
Robust and Resilient Soft Robotic Object Insertion with Compliance-Enabled Contact Formation and Failure Recovery
By integrating VLM-guided failure recovery into compliance-enabled contact formation, we achieve robust and resilient soft robotic object insertion without force sensing or controller retraining.
SCU-HandICRA 2025
Soft Conical Universal Robotic Hand for Scooping Granular Media from Containers of Various Sizes
This study proposes SCU-Hand, a soft and reconfigurable end-effector designed to scoop powdered materials from containers of various sizes using a general-purpose robotic arm. By deforming a single thin sheet into a conical shape, the SCU-Hand achieves adaptive surface contact without complex sensors or control algorithms, while maintaining the stiffness needed for efficient scooping. Experimental results demonstrate that SCU-Hand achieves over 95% scooping performance across different container sizes and granular materials, outperforming conventional rigid tools by up to 20%.
WAVEIROS 2025
Worm Gear-based Adaptive Variable Elasticity for Decoupling Actuators from External Forces
present WAVE, a worm gear-based variable stiffness actuator that decouples external forces from actuators to achieve safe, compliant, and robust manipulation.
soft-robot-sim-to-realIROS 2024
Robotic Object Insertion with a Soft Wrist through Sim-to-Real Privileged Training
zero-shot sim-to-real transfer for soft robotic object insertion.
symmetry-aware-pomdpICRA 2024
Symmetry-aware Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Assembly under Partial Observability with a Soft Wrist
we propose to leverage the symmetry for sample efficiency by augmenting the training data and constructing auxiliary losses to force the agent to adhere to the symmetry.
Saguri-botIROS 2023
Learning Robotic Assembly by Leveraging Physical Softness and Tactile Sensing
develop an anomaly detection model using a Variational Autoencoder to identify the timing of these transitions and employ learning and heuristic-based controllers to navigate the peg tip to the hole and perform the insertion.

Robust Object Insertion via Masked Encoding and Soft Wrist

Compliance-Enabled Tactile Phase Retrieval for Few-Shot Insertion Learning

A Flexible Wrist with Anisotropic and Switchable Stiffness for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Robust and Resilient Soft Robotic Object Insertion with Compliance-Enabled Contact Formation and Failure Recovery

Soft Conical Universal Robotic Hand for Scooping Granular Media from Containers of Various Sizes

Worm Gear-based Adaptive Variable Elasticity for Decoupling Actuators from External Forces

Robotic Object Insertion with a Soft Wrist through Sim-to-Real Privileged Training

Symmetry-aware Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Assembly under Partial Observability with a Soft Wrist

Learning Robotic Assembly by Leveraging Physical Softness and Tactile Sensing