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Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…

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…

Studying snake robot locomotion in a cluttered environment has been a complicated task because the motion model is discontinuous due to the physical contact with obstacles, and the contact force cannot be determined solely by contact…

Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…

Characterizing forces on deformable objects intruding into sand and soil requires understanding the solid and fluid-like responses of such substrates and their effect on the state of the object. The most detailed studies of intrusion in dry…

We investigate the dynamics of a magnetoelastic robot with a dipolar magnetic head and a slender elastic body as it performs undulatory strokes and burrows through water-saturated granular beds. The robot is actuated by an oscillating…

Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…

Accurate traversability estimation is essential for safe and effective navigation of outdoor robots operating in complex environments. This paper introduces a novel experience-based method that allows robots to autonomously learn which…

Bipedal animals have diverse morphologies and advanced locomotion abilities. Terrestrial birds, in particular, display agile, efficient, and robust running motion, in which they exploit the interplay between the body segment masses and…

Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a…

While undulatory swimming of elongate limbless robots has been extensively studied in open hydrodynamic environments, less research has been focused on limbless locomotion in complex, cluttered aquatic environments. Motivated by the concept…

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…

Soft robots have garnered significant attention due to their promising applications across various domains. A hallmark of these systems is their bilayer structure, where strain mismatch caused by differential expansion between layers…

Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…

Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…

Direct collocation methods are powerful tools to solve trajectory optimization problems in robotics. While their resulting trajectories tend to be dynamically accurate, they may also present large kinematic errors in the case of constrained…

In many systems motion occurs on deformed and deformable surfaces, setting up the possibility for dynamical interactions solely mediated by the coupling of the entities with their environment. Here we study the "two-body" dynamics of robot…

Much of the Earth and many surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies are composed of in-cohesive particle matter. Locomoting on granular terrain is challenging for common robotic devices, either wheeled or legged. In this work, we discover a…

Collaborative transport of objects via pushing by multiple robots has many applications, ranging from construction and warehouse environments to post disaster debris clean-up. Achieving collaborative transport over surfaces with different…

Tails used as inertial appendages induce body rotations of animals and robots, a phenomenon that is governed largely by the ratio of the body and tail moments of inertia. However, vertebrate tails have more degrees of freedom (e.g., number…