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The design of localization systems for small-scale flapping-wing aerial robots faces relevant challenges caused by the limited payload and onboard computational resources. This paper presents an ultra-wideband localization system…
The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with…
Aerial robots are evolving from avoiding obstacles to exploiting the environmental contact interactions for navigation, exploration and manipulation. A key challenge in such aerial physical interactions lies in handling uncertain contact…
Robotic autonomy at centimeter scale requires compact and miniaturization-friendly actuation integrated with sensing and neural network processing assembly within a tiny form factor. Applications of such systems have witnessed significant…
Controlling the flight of flapping-wing drones requires versatile controllers that handle their time-varying, nonlinear, and underactuated dynamics from incomplete and noisy sensor data. Model-based methods struggle with accurate modeling,…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
Many animals meander in environments and avoid collisions. How the underlying neuronal machinery can yield robust behaviour in a variety of environments remains unclear. In the fly brain, motion-sensitive neurons indicate the presence of…
Sliding tasks performed by aerial robots are valuable for inspection and simple maintenance tasks at height, such as non-destructive testing and painting. Although various end-effector designs have been used for such tasks, non-actuated…
Rapid and versatile object manipulation in air is an open challenge. An energy-efficient and adaptive soft gripper combined with an agile aerial vehicle could revolutionize aerial robotic manipulation in areas such as warehousing. This…
Robotic grasping under uncertainty remains a fundamental challenge due to its uncertain and contact-rich nature. Traditional rigid robotic hands, with limited degrees of freedom and compliance, rely on complex model-based and heavy feedback…
Today, the most widespread, widely applicable technology for gathering data relies on experienced scientists armed with handheld radio telemetry equipment to locate low-power radio transmitters attached to wildlife from the ground. Although…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
Learning-based methods have achieved strong performance for quadrupedal locomotion. However, several challenges prevent quadrupeds from learning helpful indoor skills that require interaction with environments and humans: lack of…
Modern humanoid robots have shown their promising potential for executing various tasks involving the grasping and manipulation of objects using their end-effectors. Nevertheless, in the most of the cases, the grasping and manipulation…
In many applications, robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured and natural environments where they encounter various types of vegetation. Vegetation presents unique challenges as a traversable obstacle, where the mechanical…
Soft growing robots, commonly referred to as vine robots, have demonstrated remarkable ability to interact safely and robustly with unstructured and dynamic environments. It is therefore natural to exploit contact with the environment for…
Under-actuated compliant robotic systems offer a promising approach to mitigating actuation and control challenges by harnessing pre-designed, embodied dynamic behaviors. This paper presents Flix-Walker, a novel, untethered,…
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…
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 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…