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Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
One way of controlling friction and associated energy losses is to engineer a deterministic structural pattern on the surface of the rubbing parts (i.e., texture engineering). Custom texturing enhances the quality of lubrication, reduces…
Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how…
Contact-rich problems, such as snake robot locomotion, offer unexplored yet rich opportunities for optimization-based trajectory and acyclic contact planning. So far, a substantial body of control research has focused on emulating snake…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Dynamics simulation with frictional contacts is important for a wide range of applications, from cloth simulation to object manipulation. Recent methods using smoothed lagged friction forces have enabled robust and differentiable simulation…
Many snakes live in deserts, forests, and river valleys and traverse challenging 3-D terrain like rocks, felled trees, and rubble, with obstacles as large as themselves and variable surface properties. By contrast, apart from branch…
Developing deterministic surfaces relies on controlling the structure of the rubbing interface so that not only the surface is of optimized topography, but also is able to self-adjust its tribological behaviour according to the evolution of…
Soft robotic snakes (SRSs) have a unique combination of continuous and compliant properties that allow them to imitate the complex movements of biological snakes. Despite the previous attempts to develop SRSs, many have been limited to…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
The wheeled three-link snake robot is a well-known example of an underactuated system modelled using nonholonomic constraints, preventing lateral slippage (skid) of the wheels. A kinematically controlled configuration assumes that both…
This paper represents an adaptive rhythmic control for a snake-like robot with 25 degrees of freedom. The adaptive gait control is implemented in algorithmic way in simulation and on a real robot. We investigated behavioral and energetic…
In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for a snake robot to move straight up a cylindrical surface. Prior works on pole-climbing for a snake robot mainly utilized a rolling helix gait, and although proven to be efficient, it does not…
Animals run robustly in diverse terrain. This locomotion robustness is puzzling because axon conduction velocity is limited to a few ten meters per second. If reflex loops deliver sensory information with significant delays, one would…
Locomotion requires that an animal or robot be able to move itself forward farther than it moves backward in each gait cycle (formally, that it be able to break the symmetry of its interactions with the world). Previous work has established…
Terrestrial locomotion requires generating appropriate ground reaction forces which depend on substrate geometry and physical properties. The richness of positions and orientations of terrain features in the 3-D world gives limbless animals…
Object transport tasks are fundamental in robotic automation, emphasizing the importance of efficient and secure methods for moving objects. Non-prehensile transport can significantly improve transport efficiency, as it enables handling…