Related papers: Energy Dissipation by Metamorphic Micro-Robots in …
While miniaturization has been a goal in robotics for nearly 40 years, roboticists have struggled to access sub-millimeter dimensions without making sacrifices to on-board information processing due to the unique physics of the microscale.…
The study of the response of amorphous materials to oscillatory strain is traditionally performed with many repeated cycles. We argue that it pays to consider carefully just one cycle (and may be a second), to reveal the rich physics that…
The applicability of the swarm robots to perform foraging tasks is inspired by their compact size and cost. A considerable amount of energy is required to perform such tasks, especially if the tasks are continuous and/or repetitive.…
The ability to modify morphology in response to environmental changes represents a highly advantageous feature in biological organisms, facilitating their adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. While some robots have the capability…
Robotic surface consisting of many actuators can change shape to perform tasks, such as facilitating human-machine interactions and transporting objects. Increasing the number of actuators can enhance the robot's capacity, but controlling…
Biomolecular machines consume free energy to break symmetry and make directed progress. Nonequilibrium ATP concentrations are the typical free energy source, with one cycle of a molecular machine consuming a certain number of ATP, providing…
Soft robots have demonstrated superior flexibility and functionality than conventional rigid robots. These versatile devices can respond to a wide range of external stimuli (including light, magnetic field, heat, electric field, etc.), and…
Continuum robots possess high flexibility and redundancy, making them well suited for safe interaction in complex environments, yet their continuous deformation and nonlinear dynamics pose fundamental challenges to perception, modeling, and…
Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
Depending on multiple parameters, soft robots can exhibit different modes of locomotion that are difficult to model numerically. As a result, improving their performance is complex, especially in small-scale systems characterized by low…
The navigation of micro-robots in complex flow environments is controlled by rheotaxis, the reorientation with respect to flow gradients. Here we demonstrate how payloads can be exploited to enhance the motion against flows. Using fully…
Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
We obtain self-similar solutions that describe the dynamics of a self-gravitating, rotating, viscous system. We use simplifying assumptions; but explicitly include viscosity and the cooling due to the dissipation of energy. By assuming that…
Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects gains great attention due to its wide applications including medical surgery, home assistance, and automatic food preparation. The ability to deform soft objects remains a great challenge for…
Semiconductor microelectronics are emerging as a powerful tool for building smart, autonomous robots too small to see with the naked eye. Yet a number of existing microrobot platforms, despite significant advantages in speed, robustness,…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
Leak detection and water quality monitoring are requirements and challenging tasks in Water Distribution Systems (WDS). In-line robots are designed for this aim. In our previous work, we designed an in-pipe robot [1]. In this research, we…