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Flippers are essential components of tracked robot locomotion systems for unstructured terrain, especially within a rescue scenario. Achieving full and semi-autonomy for such rescue robots is the goal of many research efforts. In this work,…
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
Omnidirectional MAVs are a growing field, with demonstrated advantages for aerial interaction and uninhibited observation. While systems with complete pose omnidirectionality and high hover efficiency have been developed independently, a…
In recent years, the field of legged robotics has seen growing interest in enhancing the capabilities of these robots through the integration of articulated robotic arms. However, achieving successful loco-manipulation, especially involving…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
A prototype of modular networked robot for autonomous monitoring works with full control over web through wireless connection has been developed. The robot is equipped with a particular set of built-in analyzing tools and appropriate…
The field of bio-inspired robotics seeks to create mechanical systems that mimic the designs and concepts used by biological systems. One of the more challenging biological concepts to imitate in mechanical systems is the ability to create…
Moving a module in a modular robot is a very complex and error-prone process. Unlike in swarm, in the modular robots we are targeting, the moving module must keep the connection to, at least, one other module. In order to miniaturize each…
Cooperative object transportation using multiple robots has been intensively studied in the control and robotics literature, but most approaches are either only applicable to omnidirectional robots or lack a complete navigation and…
In nature, animals with exceptional locomotion abilities, such as cougars, often possess asymmetric fore and hind legs. This observation inspired us: could optimizing the leg length of quadruped robots endow them with similar locomotive…
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…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Many robots are not equipped with a manipulator and many objects are not suitable for prehensile manipulation (such as large boxes and cylinders). In these cases, pushing is a simple yet effective non-prehensile skill for robots to interact…
Configurable robots are made up of robotic modules that can be assembled or can configure themselves into multiple robot configurations. In this research plan, a method for upper-body rehabilitation will be discussed in the form of a…
Biological systems, such as the octopus, exhibit masterful cross-scale manipulation by adaptively reconfiguring their entire form, a capability that remains elusive in robotics. Conventional soft grippers, while compliant, are mostly…
This paper presents a unified control framework for robust trajectory tracking and moving obstacle avoidance applicable to a broad class of mobile robots. By formulating a generalized kinematic transformation, we convert diverse vehicle…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Physical joint limits are common in legged robots and can restrict workspace, constrain gait design, and increase the risk of hardware damage. This paper introduces MiNI-Q^2, a miniature, wire-free quadruped robot with independently…
We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and…