Related papers: A Microstructural View of Burrowing with RoboClam
Many different robots have been designed and built to work under water. In many cases, researchers have chosen to use bio-inspired platforms. In most cases, the main goal of the fish inspired robots has been set to autonomously swim and…
Traditional rigid underwater vehicles pose risks to delicate marine ecosystems due to high-speed propellers and rigid hulls. This paper presents BactoBot, a low-cost, soft underwater robot designed for safe and gentle marine exploration.…
Run-and-tumble (RT) motion is commonly observed in flagellated microswimmers, arising from synchronous and asynchronous flagellar beating. One such example is a biflagellated alga, called \textit{Chlamydomonas reinhardtii}. Its flagellar…
Efficient acquisition of real-world embodied data has been increasingly critical. However, large-scale demonstrations captured by remote operation tend to take extremely high costs and fail to scale up the data size in an efficient manner.…
Monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms estimate drone poses and build a 3D map using a single camera. Current algorithms include sparse methods that lack detailed geometry, while learning-driven approaches produce…
Localization and mapping are core perceptual capabilities for underwater robots. Stereo cameras provide a low-cost means of directly estimating metric depth to support these tasks. However, despite recent advances in stereo depth estimation…
Locomotive robots that do not rely on electronics and/or electromagnetic components will open up new perspectives and applications for robotics. However, these robots usually involve complicated and tedious fabrication processes, limiting…
NASA aims to establish a sustainable human basecamp on the Moon as a stepping stone for future missions to Mars and beyond. The discovery of water ice on the Moon's craters located in permanently shadowed regions, which can provide drinking…
The American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) uses its soft antennae to guide decision making by extracting rich tactile information from tens of thousands of distributed mechanosensors. Although tactile sensors enable robust, autonomous…
Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel…
Navigating toy drones through uncharted GPS-denied indoor spaces poses significant difficulties due to their reliance on GPS for location determination. In such circumstances, the necessity for achieving proper navigation is a primary…
In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…
Humans use environmental constraints (EC) in manipulation to compensate for uncertainties in their world model. The same principle was recently applied to robotics, so that soft underactuated hands improve their grasping capability by using…
We present force characterizations of two newly developed insect-scale propulsors--one single-tailed and one double-tailed--for microrobotic swimmers that leverage fluid-structure interaction (FSI) to generate thrust. The designs of these…
Contemporary robots in precision agriculture focus primarily on automated harvesting or remote sensing to monitor crop health. Comparatively less work has been performed with respect to collecting physical leaf samples in the field and…
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…
Drifters designed to mimic floating marine debris and small patches of pelagic \emph{Sargassum} were satellite tracked in four regions across the North Atlantic. Though subjected to the same initial conditions at each site, the tracks of…
We present DRACo-SLAM2, a distributed SLAM framework for underwater robot teams equipped with multibeam imaging sonar. This framework improves upon the original DRACo-SLAM by introducing a novel representation of sonar maps as object graphs…
Modular Aerial Robot Systems (MARS) comprise multiple drone units with reconfigurable connected formations, providing high adaptability to diverse mission scenarios, fault conditions, and payload capacities. However, existing control…
Model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods suffer from poor sample efficiency. To overcome this limitation, this work introduces an adaptive reduced-order-model (ROM)-based reinforcement learning framework for active flow control.…