Related papers: Minimally Actuated Serial Robot
Recently, a new concept for continuum robots capable of producing macro-scale and micro-scale motion has been presented. These robots achieve their multi-scale motion capabilities by coupling direct-actuation of push-pull back-bones for…
Back injuries are the most prevalent work-related musculoskeletal disorders and represent a major cause of disability. Although innovations in wearable robots aim to alleviate this hazard, the majority of existing exoskeletons are obtrusive…
Human-robot collaborative tasks foresee interactions between humans and robots with various degrees of complexity. Specifically, for tasks which involve physical contact among the agents, challenges arise in the modelling and control of…
Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
Small-size robots offer access to spaces that are inaccessible to larger ones. This type of access is crucial in applications such as drug delivery, environmental detection, and collection of small samples. However, there are some tasks…
Soft robots have drawn great interest due to their ability to take on a rich range of shapes and motions, compared to traditional rigid robots. However, the motions, and underlying statics and dynamics, pose significant challenges to…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…
Exploration of various applications is the frontier of research on inflatable robots. We proposed an articulated robots consisting of multiple pneumatic bladder links connected by rolling contact joints called Hillberry joints. The bladder…
Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…
Robots need lightweight legs for agile locomotion, and intrinsic series elastic compliance has proven to be a major ingredient for energy-efficient locomotion and robust locomotion control. Animals' anatomy and locomotion capabilities…
Low-cost autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to help humans by simplifying and speeding up complex tasks that require their interaction with the environment, such as construction, package delivery, and search and…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
A complete mechatronic design of a minimal configuration brachiation robot is presented. The robot consists of a single rigid rod with gripper mechanisms attached to both ends. The grippers are used to hang the robot on a horizontal bar on…
While much work has been done recently in the realm of model-based control of soft robots and soft-rigid hybrids, most works examine robots that have an inherently serial structure. While these systems have been prevalent in the literature,…
Several recently released humanoid robots, inspired by the mechanical design of Cassie, employ actuator configurations in which the motors are displaced from the joints to reduce leg inertia. While studies accounting for the full kinematic…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
Small-scale robots offer significant potential in minimally-invasive medical procedures. Due to the nature of soft biological tissues, however, robots are exposed to complex environments with various challenges in locomotion, which is…