22 May 2026
While robots excel at transporting small, uniform, and well-structured items, irregular or delicate objects remain challenging, and moving large objects typically requires lots of infrastructure. This limits their application in domains such as logistics, manufacturing, agriculture, and disaster response, where such requirements are common.
To address these limitations, EMERGE partners from the University of Bristol propose combining the advantages of soft and swarm robotics inside a unified system: swarm cooperation enables the transport of large objects without heavy infrastructure, while soft actuators enable the safe handling of irregular and delicate items. This paper presents the Distributed Robotic Enhanced Soft System (DRESS), a proof-of-concept platform that integrates soft inflatable actuation with a mobile ground-based swarm to explore cooperative transport of varied object types.
Read the paper in the link below.
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