Related papers: Design and control of a soft, shape-changing, craw…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
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…
Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents "dynamic…
Recently, researchers have explored control methods that embrace nonlinear dynamic coupling instead of suppressing it. Such designs leverage dynamical coupling for communication between different parts of the robot. Morphological…
This paper presents the design, control, and applications of a multi-segment soft robotic arm. In order to design a soft arm with large load capacity, several design principles are proposed by analyzing two kinds of buckling issues, under…
Robot feet are crucial for maintaining dynamic stability and propelling the body during walking, especially on uneven terrains. Traditionally, robot feet were mostly designed as flat and stiff pieces of metal, which meets its limitations…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…
Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control…
Flying robots, such as quadrotor drones, offer new possibilities for human-robot interaction but often pose safety risks due to fast-spinning propellers, rigid structures, and noise. In contrast, lighter-than-air flapping-wing robots,…
While parallel grippers and multi-fingered robotic hands are well developed and commonly used in structured settings, it remains a challenge in robotics to design a highly articulated robotic hand that can be comparable to human hands to…
Living systems can use a single periphery to perform a variety of tasks and adapt to a dynamic environment. This multifunctionality is achieved through the use of neural circuitry that adaptively controls the reconfigurable musculature.…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades. However, it is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance…
This paper describes a novel amphibious robot, which adopts a dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism, proposing a new locomotion mode. The robot is called FroBot, since its structure and locomotion are similar to frogs. Our inspiration comes…
A robot's ability to complete a task is heavily dependent on its physical design. However, identifying an optimal physical design and its corresponding control policy is inherently challenging. The freedom to choose the number of links,…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
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…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…