This paper presents a soft anthropomorphic robotic hand with 13-DOF dexterity and capable of three modes of in-hand manipulations, including in-hand object translation, in-hand object rotation, and in-hand object reorientation. The iconic dexterity is enabled by a novel soft robotic finger design with 3 DOFs, significantly improving over existing soft actuator dexterity and realizing human-finger-like workspace. The palm is also equipped with a dedicated rotating DOF to enable opposition of fingers. Investigations on human hand model reduction, in-hand manipulation principles, as well as the fabrication procedures of the soft robotic fingers and hand were presented in detail. Dedicated experiments using the fabricated prototypes were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed robotic anthropomorphic system via a series of workspace, grasping, and in-hand manipulation tasks. The proposed soft robotic hand offers a promising design solution to a light weight, dexterous, affordable, and highly anthropomorphic robotic hand design.

Fast-growing interests in safe and effective robot-environment interactions stimulated global investigations on soft robotics. The inherent compliance of soft robots ensures promising safety features but drastically reduces force capability, thereby complicating system modeling and control. To tackle these limitations, a soft robotic joint with enhanced strength, servo performance, and impact behavior shaping is proposed in this paper, based on novel three-dimensional-printed soft origami rotary actuators. The complete workflow is presented from the concept of origami design and analytical modeling, joint design, fabrication, control, and validation experiments. The proposed approach facilitates a fully customizable joint design towards the desired force capability and motion range. Validation results from models and experiments using multiple fabricated prototypes proved the excellent performance linearity and superior force capability, with 18.5-N·m maximum torque under 180 kPa, and 300-g self-weight. The behavior shaping capability is achieved by a low-level joint-angle servo and a high-level variable-stiffness regulation; this significantly reduces the impact torque by 53% and ensures powerful and safe interactions. The comprehensive guidelines provide insightful references for soft robotic design for wider robotic applications.

Bio‐inspired soft robots provide a promising solution for robots working in human‐centered scenarios and interacting with unstructured environments. However, the functional versatility and multimodal sensing of soft robots still need improvements. On one hand, the configuration of a soft robot is predefined during manufacturing; on the other hand, the multimodal perception of the deformable soft actuator is challenging. In this work, a reconfigurable and proprioceptive soft origami module is presented, where two kinds of basic actuation modes (i.e., extension and bending) are realized, and multimodal perception is enabled using a novel foldable self‐inductance sensor. As a result, the origami module can be reconfigured to assemble multifunctional robots that can measure interaction force, body configuration, and other environmental information. Dedicated experiments are performed to validate the performance of the proposed origami module. An intelligent gripper assembled using three origami modules is designed with the capabilities of grasping mode adjustment, grasping force measurement, and the grasping target's size measurement. An intelligent jellyfish is assembled using five origami modules, and equipped with buoyancy adjustment and underwater grasping capabilities. The proposed proprioceptive modular soft origami provides an effective solution for versatile and intelligent soft robot design.

Soft robot is known for great safety in human-centered environments due to its inherent compliance. However, the compliance resulting from the soft continuum structure and viscoelastic material also induces challenges for sensing and control of soft robots. In this paper, we propose a proprioceptive soft actuator design approach based on 3D printed conductive material and 3D printed deformable structure, such as bellows. The conductive bellow exhibits effective resistance change and structural deformation, thus provides a promising solution for the challenge of deformable soft robots that need integrated actuation and sensing. The proposed proprioceptive bellow actuator (PB actuator) achieves effective position feedback and real-time output force estimation. Using a dedicated control logic of the pressure controller, the PB actuator can not only provide anticipated motion but also estimate the interactive force based on real-time position sensing and input pressure. The design, fabrication, modeling, control, and experimental validation of our proposed PB actuator are discussed in detail in this paper. The parameters of PB actuator are highly customizable depending on the intended applications. Based on the proposed PB actuator, two specialized grippers, T and Y gripper, are designed and prototyped to demonstrate the grasping force estimation capability. The proposed proprioceptive soft robotic approach provides a promising solution to design behavior steerable soft robots.

Soft robotic arms are receiving more and more attention for their intrinsic safety and natural compliance. Instead of traditional serialized rotary joints, soft robotic arms often have complex joints with coupled degrees of freedom like bending, rotation, and elongation, enabling them with more freedoms in achieving sophisticated movements. However, currently soft robotic arms are mostly focusing on bending and rotation, whereas elongation is either unavailable due to the inextensible backbone or only has a small range because of the limited contraction ratio of actuators. Furthermore, the coupling of actuators and complex structure makes the modeling and control hard. In this letter, we introduced an extensible soft robotic arm with a large elongation ratio of 400%, and give a novel modeling method from a new perspective of the force balance of the arm. The models were experimentally tested both in loaded and unloaded situations, showing the effectiveness of predicting the bending, rotation, and elongation of the arm.

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed serious challenges in multiple perspectives of human life. To diagnose COVID-19, oropharyngeal swab (OP SWAB) sampling is generally applied for viral nucleic acid (VNA) specimen collection. However, manual sampling exposes medical staff to a high risk of infection. Robotic sampling is promising to mitigate this risk to the minimum level, but traditional robot suffers from safety, cost, and control complexity issues for wide-scale deployment. In this work, we present soft robotic technology is promising to achieve robotic OP swab sampling with excellent swab manipulability in a confined oral space and works as dexterous as existing manual approach. This is enabled by a novel Tstone soft (TSS) hand, consisting of a soft wrist and a soft gripper, designed from human sampling observation and bio-inspiration. TSS hand is in a compact size, exerts larger workspace, and achieves comparable dexterity compared to human hand. The soft wrist is capable of agile omnidirectional bending with adjustable stiffness. The terminal soft gripper is effective for disposable swab pinch and replacement. The OP sampling force is easy to be maintained in a safe and comfortable range (throat sampling comfortable region) under a hybrid motion and stiffness virtual fixture-based controller. A dedicated 3 DOFs RCM platform is used for TSS hand global positioning. Design, modeling, and control of the TSS hand are discussed in detail with dedicated experimental validations. A sampling test based on human tele-operation is processed on the oral cavity model with excellent success rate. The proposed TOOS robot demonstrates a highly promising solution for tele-operated, safe, cost-effective, and quick deployable COVID-19 OP swab sampling.