Editorial: On the Planning, Control, and Perception of Soft Robotic End-Effectors

Kurzfassung

n the past, robots have been almost exclusively designed with industrial settings in mind. Accurate positioning and precise tracking were the main requirements for performing repetitive tasks in structured environments with rigid end-effectors. In recent years, robots have come out of the cages Albu-Schaffer et al. (2008) and can freely interact and collaborate with humans in unstructured scenarios. This has opened new challenges to guarantee the safety of human-robot interaction and the purposeful interaction with the environment. To this aim, soft robots that embed compliant elements in their structure have emerged as a promising solution, and compliant end-effectors have been introduced, which can interact and adapt to external conditions as human hands do, have gained increasing attention. This new framework, which encompasses the design, planning, sensing, and control of soft end-effectors, comes with several theoretical and practical open challenges. Indeed, the research community has made a considerable effort to develop novel academic and technological solutions to allow robots to operate amongst and with humans and safely move in, and interact with, unknown and unstructured environments.