Related papers: Multi-functional foot use during running in the ze…
The main contribution of this MS Thesis is centered around taking steps towards successful multi-modal demonstrations using Northeastern's legged-aerial robot, Husky Carbon. This work discusses the challenges involved in achieving…
In this paper we are interested to the zygodactyly phenomenon in birds, and in particolar in parrots. This arrangement, common in species living on trees, is a distribution of the foot with two toes facing forward and two back. We give a…
Robot feet are crucial for maintaining dynamic stability and propelling the body during walking, especially on uneven terrains. Traditionally, robot feet were mostly designed as flat and stiff pieces of metal, which meets its limitations…
Robots still struggle to dynamically traverse complex 3-D terrain with many large obstacles, an ability required for many critical applications. Body-obstacle interaction is often inevitable and induces perturbation and uncertainty in…
The Drosophila larva, a soft-body animal, can bend its body and roll efficiently to escape danger. However, contrary to common belief, this rolling motion is not driven by the imbalance of gravity and ground reaction forces. Through…
It has been found that certain biological organisms, such as Erodium seeds and Scincus scincus, are capable of effectively and efficiently burying themselves in soil. Biological Organisms employ various locomotion modes, including coiling…
We present a solvable biped walking model based on an inverted pendulum with two massless articulated legs capable of walking on uneven floors and inclined planes. The stride of the two-legged robot results from the pendular motion of a…
Small-scale structures on biological surfaces can profoundly impact how animals move, appear, and interact with their environments. Such textures may be especially important for limbless reptiles, such as snakes and legless lizards, because…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Dislocations, line defects in crystalline materials, play an essential role in the mechanical[1,2], electrical[3], optical[4], thermal[5], and phase transition[6] properties of these materials. Dislocation motion, an important mechanism…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
Realizing bipedal locomotion on humanoid robots with point feet is especially challenging due to their highly underactuated nature, high degrees of freedom, and hybrid dynamics resulting from impacts. With the goal of addressing this…
We study the frog model on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with drift in dimension $d \geq 2$ and establish the existence of transient and recurrent regimes depending on the transition probabilities. We focus on a model in which the particles perform…
In this letter, we present tightly coupled LiDAR-IMU-leg odometry, which is robust to challenging conditions such as featureless environments and deformable terrains. We developed an online learning-based leg kinematics model named the…
Knee-less bipedal robots like SLIDER have the advantage of ultra-lightweight legs and improved walking energy efficiency compared to traditional humanoid robots. In this paper, we firstly introduce an improved hardware design of the SLIDER…
In this paper we study crawling locomotion based on directional frictional interactions, namely, frictional forces that are sensitive to the sign of the sliding velocity. Surface interactions of this type are common in biology, where they…
Fluidisation is the process by which the weight of a bed of particles is supported by a gas flow passing through it from below. When fluidised materials flow down an incline, the dynamics of the motion differ from their non-fluidised…
Study of the locomotion of a centipede (L. forficatus) at the air-water interface reveals that it does not predominantly use its 14 leg pairs to locomote; unlike most swimmers which propagate head-to-tail body bending waves, this species…
Legged locomotion shows promise for running in complex, unstructured environments. Designing such legged robots requires considering heterogeneous, multi-domain constraints and variables, from mechanical hardware and geometry choices to…
This study proposes a step adaptation framework for running through spring-mass trajectories and deadbeat control gain libraries. It includes four main parts: (1) Automatic spring-mass trajectory library generation; (2) Deadbeat control…