Soft manipulation fundamentally differs from traditional approaches to robotic manipulation and, as a result, much of the established wisdom of traditional manipulation must be questioned. Of course, most of the past results remain valid and form a conceptual basis for soft manipulation, but this basis must be partially revised and extended significantly to fully leverage the power of soft manipulation. In this special issue, we document some of our field’s early attempts towards defining this extended conceptual foundation in an attempt to devise a comprehensive and competent approach to robot manipulation. The emerging field of soft manipulation transfers important insights from human manipulation into dexterous robotics. Studies of human manipulation revealed substantial differences in the ways humans and robots interact with their environment. For example, during manipulation, humans often leverage contact, not just with the manipulandum but also with the environment. This manifests itself in sliding objects across surfaces, pushing them against others, constraining them in corners, etc. The deliberate exploitation of these contact dynamics permits the delegation of aspects of perception and control to the interactions between hand and environment. For example, the height of a table does not need to be determined in absolute terms, when the hand can simply be lowered onto its surface until contact is achieved. This effectively outsources aspects of perception and control to the physical world, reducing the requirements on explicit perception and control, as we only have to perceive the rough location of the table and the contact forces acting on the robotic hand. This stands in stark contrast with traditional strategies in robotic manipulation, which regard the environment as an obstacle. They avoid environmental contact to prevent damage to the robot and the environment.

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社论

软操纵从根本上不同于传统的机器人操纵方法，因此，必须质疑传统操纵的大部分既定智慧。当然，大多数过去的结果仍然有效，并形成了软操纵的概念基础，但必须对该基础进行部分修改和显着扩展，以充分利用软操纵的力量。在本期特刊中，我们记录了我们领域在定义这一扩展概念基础方面的一些早期尝试，以期设计出一种全面而有效的机器人操作方法。新兴的软操纵领域将重要的见解从人类操纵转移到灵巧的机器人技术中。对人类操纵的研究揭示了人类和机器人与其环境互动的方式存在重大差异。例如，在操作过程中，人类经常利用接触，不仅与操作器而且与环境接触。这表现为在表面上滑动物体，将它们推向其他物体，将它们限制在角落等。对这些接触动态的故意利用允许将感知和控制的各个方面委托给手和环境之间的交互。例如，桌子的高度不需要绝对确定，此时手可以简单地降低到其表面直到实现接触。这有效地将感知和控制的各个方面外包给了物理世界，减少了对显式感知和控制的要求，因为我们只需要感知桌子的粗略位置和作用在机器人手上的接触力。这与机器人操作中将环境视为障碍的传统策略形成鲜明对比。它们避免环境接触，以防止对机器人和环境造成损害。