Related papers: A Reconfigurable USAR Robot Designed for Traversin…
Drones are also known as UAVs are originally designed for military purposes. With the technological advances, they can be seen in most of the aspects of life from filming to logistics. The increased use of drones made it sometimes essential…
Mudskippers are unique amphibious fish capable of locomotion in diverse environments, including terrestrial surfaces, aquatic habitats, and highly viscous substrates such as mud. This versatile locomotion is largely enabled by their…
Intelligent systems are increasingly part of our everyday lives and have been integrated seamlessly to the point where it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Physical manifestations of those systems on the other hand, in the form…
Socially Assistive Robots navigate highly sensible environments, which place high demands on safety and communication with users. The reasoning behind an SAR's actions must be transparent at any time to earn users' trust and acceptance.…
Over the past decade, a multitude of service robots have been developed to fulfill a wide range of practical purposes. Notably, roles such as reception and robotic guidance have garnered extensive popularity. In these positions, robots are…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…
This paper focuses on the teaming aspects and the role of heterogeneity in a multi-robot system applied to robot-aided urban search and rescue (USAR) missions. We propose a needs-driven multi-robot cooperation mechanism represented through…
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, and many in the robotics community are looking for ways to contribute. This paper presents a roadmap for climate-relevant robotics research, identifying high-impact…
The current spread of social and assistive robotics applications is increasingly highlighting the need for robots that can be easily taught and interacted with, even by users with no technical background. Still, it is often difficult to…
Robot designs can take many inspirations from nature, where there are many examples of highly resilient and fault-tolerant locomotion strategies to navigate complex terrains by using multi-functional appendages. For example, Chukar and…
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…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…
Robotic designs played an important role in recent advances by providing powerful robots with complex mechanics. Many recent systems rely on parallel actuation to provide lighter limbs and allow more complex motion. However, these emerging…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…
Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…
Search-and-rescue (SaR) in unknown environments requires precise, optimal, and fast decisions. Robots are promising candidates for autonomously performing SaR tasks in unknown environments. While humans use their heuristics to effectively…
Motion planning for a multi-limbed climbing robot must consider the robot's posture, joint torques, and how it uses contact forces to interact with its environment. This paper focuses on motion planning for a robot that uses nontraditional…
To perform tasks well in a new domain, one must first know something about it. This paper reports on a robot controller for navigation through unfamiliar indoor worlds. Based on spatial affordances, it integrates planning with reactive…
This paper presents the framework for a novel Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN) architecture and explains its need in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) applications. Our approach emphasizes interpersonal distance and how spatial…
The paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the…