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Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Undesired lateral and longitudinal wheel slippage can disrupt a mobile robot's heading angle, traction, and, eventually, desired motion. This issue makes the robotization and accurate modeling of heavy-duty machinery very challenging…
Miniature locomotion robots with the ability to navigate confined environments show great promise for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue operations. Soft miniature locomotion robots, as a burgeoning field, have attracted…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
In both animals and robots, locomotion capabilities are determined by the physical structure of the system. The majority of legged animals and robots are bilaterally symmetric, which facilitates locomotion with consistent headings and…
Follow-the-leader (FTL) motion is essential for continuum robots operating in fragile and confined environments. It allows the robot to exert minimal force on its surroundings, reducing the risk of damage. This paper presents a novel design…
Snapping instabilities in soft structures offer a powerful pathway to achieve rapid and energy-efficient actuation. In this study, an eccentric dome-shaped snapping actuator is developed to generate controllable asymmetric motion through…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
This paper presents the development of an adaptive intelligent spider robot. With the incorporation of sensors, the four-legged spider robot is able to monitor the environment wirelessly. A new auto-station adaptation National Instrument…
This paper presents a couple of interesting ideas: a telescopic actuator design and a bio-inspired sea urchin robot. The "spines" of the sea urchin robot consist of fourteen telescopic actuators equally distributed over it's spherical body.…
A spherical robot has many practical advantages as the entire electronics are protected within a hull and can be carried easily by any Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). However, its use is limited due to finding mounts for sensors. Pendulum…
Modern climbing robots have risen to great heights, but mechanisms meant to scale cliffs often locomote slowly and over-cautiously on level ground. Here we introduce T-RHex, an iteration on the classic cockroach-inspired hexapod that has…
Multi-organ segmentation is a critical yet challenging task due to complex anatomical backgrounds, blurred boundaries, and diverse morphologies. This study introduces the Gradient-aware Adaptive Momentum Evolution Deep Snake (GAMED-Snake)…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
Symmetry is a central organizing principle in natural systems, yet its use as a unifying design strategy in robotics has largely remained limited to geometric form. We show that symmetry can instead be leveraged at the level of dynamic…
Legged locomotion shows promise for running in complex, unstructured environments. Designing such legged robots requires considering heterogeneous, multi-domain constraints and variables, from mechanical hardware and geometry choices to…
Anthropomimetic robots are robots that sense, behave, interact and feel like humans. By this definition, anthropomimetic robots require human-like physical hardware and actuation, but also brain-like control and sensing. The most…
This paper introduces Bruce, the CSIRO Dynamic Hexapod Robot capable of autonomous, dynamic locomotion over difficult terrain. This robot is built around Apptronik linear series elastic actuators, and went from design to deployment in under…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…