Related papers: Hydrodynamic surrogate models for bio-inspired mic…
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is central to race-car aerodynamic development, yet its cost -- tens of thousands of core-hours per high-fidelity evaluation -- severely limits the design space exploration feasible within realistic…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
Bacteria can exploit mechanics to display remarkable plasticity in response to locally changing physical and chemical conditions. Compliant structures play a striking role in their taxis behavior, specifically for navigation inside complex…
The objective of this work is to expand upon previous works, considering socially acceptable behaviours within robot navigation and interaction, and allow a robot to closely approach static and dynamic individuals or groups. The space…
A new fluid-driven soft robot hand in this study uses the idea of the bionics and has the anthropomorphic form, which is oriented to the flexible grasp function. The soft robot hand is composed of a new kind of multi-freedom soft finger and…
This article presents an original methodology for the prediction of steady turbulent aerodynamic fields. Due to the important computational cost of high-fidelity aerodynamic simulations, a surrogate model is employed to cope with the…
Soft robots have shown immense promise in settings where they can leverage dynamic control of their entire bodies. However, effective dynamic shape control requires a controller that accounts for the robot's high-dimensional dynamics--a…
It is well-known that inverse dynamics models can improve tracking performance in robot control. These models need to precisely capture the robot dynamics, which consist of well-understood components, e.g., rigid body dynamics, and effects…
We present new constrained and free-swimming experiments and simulations of a pair of pitching hydrofoils interacting in a minimal school. The hydrofoils have an out-of-phase synchronization and they are varied through in-line, staggered,…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
Contact modeling plays a central role in motion planning, simulation, and control of legged robots, as legged locomotion is realized through contact. The two prevailing approaches to model the contact consider rigid and compliant premise at…
Learning the inverse dynamics of soft continuum robots remains challenging due to high-dimensional nonlinearities and complex actuation coupling. Conventional feedback-based controllers often suffer from control chattering due to corrective…
Real-time thermal-hydraulic simulation is essential for digital twin (DT) technology that supports the safe and efficient operation of small modular reactors (SMRs). Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides high-fidelity flow analysis,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant strides in legged robot control, enabling locomotion across diverse terrains and complex loco-manipulation capabilities. However, the commonly used position or velocity tracking-based…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
The one-to-one mapping of control inputs to actuator outputs results in elaborate routing architectures that limit how complex fluidic soft robot behaviours can currently become. Embodied intelligence can be used as a tool to counteract…
Microorganisms have evolved diverse strategies to propel in viscous fluids, navigate complex environments, and exhibit taxis in response to stimuli. This has inspired the development of synthetic microrobots, where machine learning (ML) is…
We explore the locomotion of soft robots in granular medium (GM) resulting from the elastic deformation of slender rods. A low-cost, rapidly fabricable robot inspired by the physiological structure of bacteria is presented. It consists of a…
This paper develops a surrogate model refinement approach for the simulation of dynamical systems and the solution of optimization problems governed by dynamical systems in which surrogates replace expensive-to-compute state- and…