Soft Manipulation With Fewer Actuators
A common way to build a manipulation surface is to place many actuators under it. That can work, but it makes the platform expensive, mechanically dense, and difficult to scale.
In our RoboSoft 2025 paper, we explored a different design: a soft surface actuated by fewer vertical actuators, spaced far enough apart that the object can be much smaller than the distance between actuators. This creates a control problem because the surface is nonlinear and continuous, but it also creates a hardware opportunity: fewer actuators can cover a larger area.
What the surface does
The surface changes shape, and the object moves because gravity, contact geometry, and surface deformation combine into a controllable motion field. The robot does not grasp the object. It changes the world under the object.
Why heterogeneous objects matter
Real applications rarely contain one perfect object. Objects differ in weight, shape, size, fragility, and friction. A manipulation surface should not need a new gripper for every case.
That is why this line of work focuses on heterogeneous objects. The long-term question is whether a single soft surface can provide enough controllability while staying mechanically simple.
What I learned
Hardware simplicity moves complexity into modeling, sensing, and control. That tradeoff is not automatically good, but it is interesting: if the surface can be controlled robustly, sparse actuation makes the system much easier to scale.
Paper: DOI