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While there is no replacement for the learned expertise, devotion, and social benefits of a guide dog, there are cases in which a robot navigation assistant could be helpful for individuals with blindness or low vision (BLV). This study…
Compared to conventional wheeled transportation systems designed for flat surfaces, soft robots exhibit exceptional adaptability to various terrains, enabling stable movement in complex environments. However, due to the risk of collision…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall…
This thesis presents a solution that enables aerial robots to reason about surrounding wind flow fields in real time using on board sensors and embedded flight hardware. The core novelty of this research is the fusion of range measurements…
Robotic manipulation of highly deformable cloth presents a promising opportunity to assist people with several daily tasks, such as washing dishes; folding laundry; or dressing, bathing, and hygiene assistance for individuals with severe…
Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals across different species to share the same narrow design space for optimal high-efficient and energy-saving locomotion, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…
Robotic blimps, as lighter-than-air (LTA) aerial systems, offer long endurance and inherently safe operation but remain highly susceptible to wind disturbances. Building on recent advances in moving mass actuation, this paper addresses the…
Active sensing and planning in unknown, cluttered environments is an open challenge for robots intending to provide home service, search and rescue, narrow-passage inspection, and medical assistance. Although many active sensing methods…
Positioning with one inertial measurement unit and one ranging sensor is commonly thought to be feasible only when trajectories are in certain patterns ensuring observability. For this reason, to pursue observable patterns, it is required…
Bio-inspired vehicles are currently leading the way in the quest to produce a vehicle capable of flight and underwater navigation. However, a fully functional vehicle has not yet been realized. We present the first fully functional vehicle…
Innovative ideas are continuously emerging to produce better life conditions where essential human needs are supposed to be fulfilled with perfect scenarios leading us to propose modern strategies drawing the future of smart cities. In this…
This paper introduces a pair of low-cost, light-weight and compliant force-sensing gripping pads used for manipulating box-like objects with smaller-sized humanoid robots. These pads measure normal gripping forces and center of pressure…
A mobility mechanism for robots to be used in tight spaces shared with people requires it to have a small footprint, to move omnidirectionally, as well as to be highly maneuverable. However, currently there exist few such mobility…
Existing research has yet to reach a consensus on whether and how small flying animals utilize elastic energy storage mechanisms to reduce flight energy expenditure, and there is a lack of systematic and universal methods for assessment. To…
Inspired by the behavior of birds, we present AirCrab, a hybrid aerial ground manipulator (HAGM) with a single active wheel and a 3-degree of freedom (3-DoF) manipulator. AirCrab leverages a single point of contact with the ground to reduce…
Friction is the essential mediator of terrestrial locomotion, yet in robotic systems it is almost always treated as a passive property fixed by surface materials and conditions. Here, we introduce ultrasonic lubrication as a method to…
Leveraging background fluid flows for propulsion has the potential to enhance the range and speed of autonomous aerial and underwater vehicles. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally a fully autonomous strategy for exploiting vortex…
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…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…