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A common architecture for torque controlled humanoid robots consists in two nested loops. The outer loop generates desired joint/motor torques, and the inner loop stabilises these desired values. In doing so, the inner loop usually…
With the potential applications of capsule robots in medical endoscopy, accurate dynamic control of the capsule robot is becoming more and more important. In the scale of a capsule robot, the friction between capsule and the environment…
Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
Many industries extensively use flexible materials. Effective approaches for handling flexible objects with a robot manipulator must address residual vibrations. Existing solutions rely on complex models, use additional instrumentation for…
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
Friction is the essential mediator of terrestrial locomotion, yet in robotic systems it is almost always treated as a passive property fixed by surface materials and conditions. Here, we introduce ultrasonic lubrication as a method to…
Balancing oneself using the spine is a physiological alignment of the body posture in the most efficient manner by the muscular forces for mammals. For this reason, we can see many disabled quadruped animals can still stand or walk even…
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological systems naturally exhibit robustness, there is no…
Smart surfaces that reversibly change the interfacial friction coefficients in response to external stimuli enable a wide range of applications, such as grips, seals, brake pads, packaging films, and fabrics. Here a new concept of such a…
The ability of responding to environmental stimuli with appropriate actions is a property shared by all living organisms, and it is also sought in the design of robotic systems. Phenotypic plasticity provides a way for achieving this…
Robots which make use of soft or compliant inter- actions often leverage tendon-driven actuation which enables actuators to be placed more flexibly, and compliance to be maintained. However, controlling complex tendon systems is…
A challenging and important problem for tendon-driven multi-fingered robotic hands is to ensure grasping adaptivity while minimizing the number of actuators needed to provide human-like functionality. Inspired by the Pisa/IIT SoftHand, this…
Electromechanical switching devices, such as solenoid valves, contactors, and relays, suffer from undesirable phenomena like clicking, mechanical wear, and contact bounce. Despite that, they are still widely used in industry due to their…
Accurately modeling friction in robotics remains a core challenge, as robotics simulators like MuJoCo and PyBullet use simplified friction models or heuristics to balance computational efficiency with accuracy, where these simplifications…
Robots will become ubiquitously useful only when they can use few attempts to teach themselves to perform different tasks, even with complex bodies and in dynamical environments. Vertebrates, in fact, successfully use trial-and-error to…
Breakloose friction, the transient force peak at the onset of sliding, is often pronounced in nanoscale contacts but weak or absent in macroscopic systems. Although this behavior is commonly associated with rupture fronts and process-zone…
Tendon-driven robots, where one or more tendons under tension bend and manipulate a flexible backbone, can improve minimally invasive surgeries involving difficult-to-reach regions in the human body. Planning motions safely within…
A hierarchical control architecture is presented for energy-efficient control of legged robots subject to variety of linear/nonlinear inequality constraints such as Coulomb friction cones, switching unilateral contacts, actuator saturation…
Applications of magnetic memory devices greatly benefit from ultra-fast, low-power switching. Here we propose how this can be achieved efficiently in a nano-sized synthetic antiferromagnet by using perpendicular-to-the-plane…
Force and proximity sensors are key in robotics, especially when applied in collaborative robots that interact physically or cognitively with humans in real unstructured environments. However, most existing sensors for use in robotics are…