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This paper develops a communication-efficient distributed mapping approach for rapid exploration of a cave by a multi-robot team. Subsurface planetary exploration is an unsolved problem challenged by communication, power, and compute…
Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with…
The paper focuses on modeling and experimental evaluation of a quadcopter team configurable coordination guided by a single quadruped robot. We consider the quadcopter team as particles of a two-dimensional deformable body and propose a…
We consider the problem of building an assistive robotic system that can help humans in daily household cleanup tasks. Creating such an autonomous system in real-world environments is inherently quite challenging, as a general solution may…
The waist plays a crucial role in the agile movement of many animals in nature. It provides the torso with additional degrees of freedom and flexibility, inspiring researchers to incorporate this biological feature into robotic structures…
This paper details a significant milestone towards maturing a buoyant aerial robotic platform, or aerobot, for flight in the Venus clouds. We describe two flights of our subscale altitude-controlled aerobot, fabricated from the materials…
While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
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…
Mudskippers are unique amphibious fish capable of locomotion in diverse environments, including terrestrial surfaces, aquatic habitats, and highly viscous substrates such as mud. This versatile locomotion is largely enabled by their…
High-speed legged navigation in discrete and geometrically complex environments is a challenging task because of the high-degree-of-freedom dynamics and long-horizon, nonconvex nature of the optimization problem. In this work, we propose a…
Taking inspiration from the natural gait transition mechanism of quadrupeds, devising a good gait transition strategy is important for quadruped robots to achieve energy-efficient locomotion on various terrains and velocities. While…
In unknown cluttered and dynamic environments such as disaster scenes, mobile robots need to perform target-driven navigation in order to find people or objects of interest, while being solely guided by images of the targets. In this paper,…
Background: Assistance robots have the potential to increase the independence of people who need daily care due to limited mobility or being wheelchair-bound. Current solutions of attaching robotic arms to motorized wheelchairs offer…
This paper develops an algorithm that guides a multi-robot system in an unknown environment in search of fixed targets. The area to be scanned contains an unknown number of convex obstacles of unknown size and shape. The algorithm covers…
This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling an on-orbit assembly mission scenario of a large flexible structure using a multi-arm robot. This methodology accounts for significant changes in inertia and flexibility…
Continuum soft robots, composed of flexible materials, exhibit theoretically infinite degrees of freedom, enabling notable adaptability in unstructured environments. Cosserat Rod Theory has emerged as a prominent framework for modeling…
Learning-based robotics research driven by data demands a new approach to robot hardware design-one that serves as both a platform for policy execution and a tool for embodied data collection to train policies. We introduce ToddlerBot, a…
Venus is known for its extreme surface temperature and its sulfuric acid clouds. But the cloud layers on Venus have similar temperature and pressure conditions to those on the surface of Earth and are conjectured to be a possible habitat…
Robots able to run, fly, and grasp have a high potential to solve a wide scope of tasks and navigate in complex environments. Several mechatronic designs of such robots with adaptive morphologies are emerging. However, the task of landing…