The evolution of robotics has extended beyond its industrial origins, seamlessly integrating into our daily lives. This transformation is marked by closer and more dynamic interactions between robots and humans. Such interactions enable the extension of human capabilities in various aspects. Notably, the fields of extra robotic limbs and haptic interfaces are expanding, enhancing manipulation capabilities and enriching tactile interaction with both the real and digital worlds. These disciplines necessitate close physical interactions with humans and bring unique challenges related to safety, adaptability, personalization, and comfortâ crucial for their effective integration into daily life.

The classic approach to designing extra robotic limbs and haptic interfaces relies on rigid actuation, sensing, and mechanisms, which provide fast, precise, and accurate systems. However, these rigid methods face challenges in achieving non-bulky, miniaturized, and safe robotic interfaces. The inherent rigidity of these interfaces limits their compliance with the human body and their facilitation of soft interactions, constraining their usage in close contact with humans in daily activities.

Soft robotics has emerged as a promising approach to address the limitations of rigid counterparts, offering compliant, reconfigurable, and adaptable mechanisms integrated with soft actuation and sensing methods. Despite their potential to facilitate safer and closer human-robot interaction, challenges remain in modeling, sensing, control, and system integration within the field. Beyond technical difficulties, there is a lack of understanding of interactions in a quantified manner and how to replicate them in a personalized way with developed robotic platforms.

In this thesis, I seek answers to the following research questions: 1) How can we design mechanically safe extra robotic limbs and haptic interfaces that are adaptable to diverse users, tasks, and situations? 2) How can we utilize these technologies to understand, quantify, and replicate our interaction with the environment? 3) How do we leverage this understanding to enhance the daily human experience with additional manipulation capabilities and tactile interaction with extended and remote realities?

This thesis highlights the transformative impact of soft and folding robots on the extension of physical human capabilities through human-robot interaction, with a focus on extra robotic limbs and haptic platforms. I present solutions to the current challenges in soft and origami robotics for the realization of safe, lightweight, comfortable, and adaptable wearable extra robotic arms, and compact, compliant, and miniaturized haptic interfaces. Additionally, I propose a quantitative understanding model of physical interactions and a method to replicate them in a personalized manner. I demonstrate that the developed technologies enhance human capabilities by enabling more complex manipulation tasks and by providing bidirectional tactile communication with enhanced and remote realities. Thus, this thesis lays the foundation for closer and safer collaboration and integration between humans and robots, paving the way for a richer human experience. The research outcomes have the potential to redefine human-robot and human-human relationships, envisioning a future characterized by enhanced collaboration and mutual benefit.