Related papers: Tuning upstream swimming of micro-robots by shape …
Pursuing a drifting target in a turbulent flow is an extremely difficult task whenever the searcher has limited propulsion and maneuvering capabilities. Even in the case when the relative distance between pursuer and target stays below the…
Nature has always inspired scientists and engineers to understand the underlying mechanism leading to optimal design in bio-inspired dynamics. This study presents a computational framework for optimizing undulatory swimming profiles using a…
Through billions of years of evolution, microorganisms mastered unique swimming behaviors to thrive in complex fluid environments. Limitations in nanofabrication have thus far hindered the ability to design and program synthetic swimmers…
We propose ReinFlow, a simple yet effective online reinforcement learning (RL) framework that fine-tunes a family of flow matching policies for continuous robotic control. Derived from rigorous RL theory, ReinFlow injects learnable noise…
Many different robots have been designed and built to work under water. In many cases, researchers have chosen to use bio-inspired platforms. In most cases, the main goal of the fish inspired robots has been set to autonomously swim and…
Soft-growing robots are innovative devices that feature plant-inspired growth to navigate environments. Thanks to their embodied intelligence of adapting to their surroundings and the latest innovation in actuation and manufacturing, it is…
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…
We design and test an octopus-inspired flexible hull robot that demonstrates outstanding fast-starting performance. The robot is hyper-inflated with water, and then rapidly deflates to expel the fluid so as to power the escape maneuver.…
Building intelligent autonomous systems at any scale is challenging. The sensing and computation constraints of a microrobot platform make the problems harder. We present improvements to learning-based methods for on-board learning of…
Navigating efficiently across vortical flow fields presents a significant challenge in various robotic applications. The dynamic and unsteady nature of vortical flows often disturbs the control of underwater robots, complicating their…
Multirotors can be effectively applied to various tasks, such as transportation, investigation, exploration, and lifesaving, depending on the type of payload. However, due to the nature of multirotors, the payload loaded on the multirotor…
In this study, we use numerical simulations to investigate the flow field induced by a single magnetic microrobot rotating with a constant angular speed about an axis perpendicular to an underlying surface. A parallel solver for steady…
Underwater robotic manipulation faces significant challenges due to complex fluid dynamics and unstructured environments, causing most manipulation systems to rely heavily on human teleoperation. In this paper, we introduce AquaBot, a fully…
Elongate animals and robots use undulatory body waves to locomote through diverse environments. Geometric mechanics provides a framework to model and optimize such systems in highly damped environments, connecting a prescribed shape change…
This paper presents methods for finding optimal configurations and actuator forces/torques to maximise contact wrenches in a desired direction for Underwater Vehicles Manipulator Systems (UVMS). The wrench maximisation problem is formulated…
Microorganisms ofter move in confined, disordered environments, where hydrodynamic couplings can modify their transport behavior. Using extensive finite-element simulations, we investigate the dynamics of microswimmers -- modeled as…
We study the energetic efficiency of navigating microswimmers by explicitly taking into account the geometry of their body. We show that, as their shape transitions from prolate to oblate, non-steering microswimmers rotated by flow…
Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control…
The one-to-one mapping of control inputs to actuator outputs results in elaborate routing architectures that limit how complex fluidic soft robot behaviours can currently become. Embodied intelligence can be used as a tool to counteract…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interaction with uncertainty…