IIT SoftFoot (MJCF)

Requires MuJoCo 3.2.0 or later.

Overview

This package contains a simplified robot description (MJCF) of the IIT SoftFoot. The original MJCF and assets were provided directly by IIT Soft Robotics for Human Cooperation and Rehabilitation group under an BSD-3-Clause License. For more information on the SoftFoot, see the following references:

• Piazza, C., Della Santina, C., Grioli, G., Bicchi, A. and Catalano, M.G., 2024. Analytical Model and Experimental Testing of the SoftFoot: An Adaptive Robot Foot for Walking Over Obstacles and Irregular Terrains. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
• Crotti, M., Rossini, L., Pace, A., Grioli, G., Bicchi, A. and Catalano, M.G., 2024. Soft Adaptive Feet for Legged Robots: An Open-Source Model for Locomotion Simulation. IEEE Access, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3608584

Usage

The SoftFoot model is intended to be attached as an end effector to a legged robot. This can be achieved through several methods:

• Using the <attach/> element in the robot MJCF, and referencing the attachment_cube body from the softfoot MJCF. The provided example scene.xml uses this method.
• Procedurally attaching it through mjSpec.
• Adding the SoftFoot to the MJCF through the mjcf python module.

License

This model is released under an BSD-3-Clause License.

Publications

If you use this work in an academic context, please cite the following publications:

Crotti, M., Rossini, L., Hodossy, K. B., Pace, A., Grioli, G., Bicchi, A. and Catalano, M. G., "Soft Adaptive Feet for Legged Robots: An Open-Source Model for Locomotion Simulation“, in arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.03191, 2024. (DOI)

@article{anymal2017,
    title={Soft Adaptive Feet for Legged Robots: An Open-Source Model for Locomotion Simulation},
    author={Crotti, Matteo and Rossini, Luca and Hodossy, K. Balint and Pace, Anna and Grioli, Giorgio and Bicchi, Antonio and and Catalano, Manuel G.},
    journal={arXiv},
    volume={},
    number={},
    pages={},
    year={2024},
    publisher={}
    doi = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2412.03191}
}

Piazza, C., Della Santina, C., Grioli, G., Bicchi, A. and Catalano, M. G., "Analytical Model and Experimental Testing of the SoftFoot: An Adaptive Robot Foot for Walking Over Obstacles and Irregular Terrains“, in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2024. (DOI)

@article{softfoot2024,
    author={Piazza, Cristina and Santina, Cosimo Della and Grioli, Giorgio and Bicchi, Antonio and Catalano, Manuel G.},
    journal={IEEE Transactions on Robotics}, 
    title={Analytical Model and Experimental Testing of the SoftFoot: An Adaptive Robot Foot for Walking Over Obstacles and Irregular Terrains}, 
    year={2024},
    volume={40},
    number={},
    pages={3290-3305},
    keywords={Foot;Robots;Legged locomotion;Stability analysis;Robot kinematics;Shape;Humanoid robots;Adaptive foot;humanoid robots;soft robots},
    doi={10.1109/TRO.2024.3415237}
}