DRESS: Distributed Robotic Enhanced Soft System for Non-Uniform Object Transportation

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, we 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. DRESS enhances the existing DOTS swarm platform by incorporating three soft actuator modules: a top pillow that secures items, a bottom doughnut that mitigates collision impact, and a soft lifter that provides compliant lifting and adapts to the shape of the object being carried. Preliminary experiments with diverse payloads demonstrate the system’s potential for safe manipulation and decentralised coordination. The results demonstrate the feasibility of hybrid soft–swarm systems and highlight future directions for adaptive, infrastructure-free object transport.