Related papers: A Microstructural View of Burrowing with RoboClam
Miniature robots provide unprecedented access to confined environments and show promising potential for novel applications such as search-and-rescue and high-value asset inspection. The capability of body deformation further enhances the…
Traditional locomotion strategies become ineffective at low Reynolds numbers, where viscous forces predominate over inertial forces. To adapt, microorganisms have evolved specialized structures like cilia and flagella for efficient…
Rheotaxis is a well-known phenomenon among microbial organisms and artificial active colloids, wherein the swimmers respond to an imposed flow. We report the first experimental evidence of upstream rheotaxis by spherical active droplets. It…
Aerial robots interacting with objects must perform precise, contact-rich maneuvers under uncertainty. In this paper, we study the problem of aerial ball juggling using a quadrotor equipped with a racket, a task that demands accurate…
Graph-SLAM is a well-established algorithm for constructing a topological map of the environment while simultaneously attempting the localisation of the robot. It relies on scan matching algorithms to align noisy observations along robot's…
This paper presents ORB-SLAM, a feature-based monocular SLAM system that operates in real time, in small and large, indoor and outdoor environments. The system is robust to severe motion clutter, allows wide baseline loop closing and…
This work introduces a novel approach for Titan exploration based on soft morphing aerial robots leveraging the use of flexible adaptive materials. The controlled deformation of the multirotor arms, actuated by a combination of a pneumatic…
Rescue missions in mountain environments are hardly achievable by standard legged robots-because of the high slopes-or by flying robots-because of limited payload capacity. We present a concept for a rope-aided climbing robot which can…
For decades, people have been seeking for fishlike flapping motions that can realize underwater propulsion with low energy cost. Complexity of the nonstationary flow field around the flapping body makes this problem very difficult. In…
This technical report gives an overview of our work on control algorithms dealing with redundant robot systems for achieving human-like motion characteristics. Previously, we developed a novel control law to exhibit human-motion…
Successful robotic grasping in cluttered environments not only requires a model to visually ground a target object but also to reason about obstructions that must be cleared beforehand. While current vision-language embodied reasoning…
We aim to track the endoscope location inside the surgical scene and provide 3D reconstruction, in real-time, from the sole input of the image sequence captured by the monocular endoscope. This information offers new possibilities for…
We design and test an octopus-inspired flexible hull robot that demonstrates outstanding fast-starting performance. The robot is hyper-inflated with water, and then rapidly deflates to expel the fluid so as to power the escape maneuver.…
In this paper, we propose a general unified tracking-servoing approach for controlling the shape of elastic deformable objects using robotic arms. Our approach works by forming a lattice around the object, binding the object to the lattice,…
Exploring planetary bodies with lower gravity, such as the moon and Mars, allows legged robots to utilize jumping as an efficient form of locomotion thus giving them a valuable advantage over traditional rovers for exploration. Motivated by…
As robots are deployed in complex situations, engineers and end users must develop a holistic understanding of their behaviors, capabilities, and limitations. Some behaviors are directly optimized by the objective function. They often…
We present ROCK (Rolling One-motor Controlled rocK), a 1 degree-of-freedom robot consisting of a round shell and an internal pendulum. An uneven shell surface enables steering by using only the movement of the pendulum, allowing for…
Robotic pollination offers a promising alternative to manual labor and bumblebee-assisted methods in controlled agriculture, where wind-driven pollination is absent and regulatory restrictions limit the use of commercial pollinators. In…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is essential for precise surgical interventions and robotic tasks in minimally invasive procedures. While recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have improved SLAM with high-quality…
We use high-speed x-ray imaging to reveal how a small (~10cm) desert dwelling lizard, the sandfish (Scincus scincus), swims within a granular medium [1]. On the surface, the lizard uses a standard diagonal gait, but once below the surface,…