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Background The development of a simulation model of full body reaching tasks that can predict endeffector trajectories and joint excursions consistent with experimental data is a non-trivial task. Because of the kinematic redundancy…
Compared to the micro continuum robots that use traditional manufacturing technology, the micro fabricated continuum robots are different in terms of the application of smart materials, additive manufacturing process, and physical field…
In spite of recent progress, soft robotics still suffers from a lack of unified modeling framework. Nowadays, the most adopted model for the design and control of soft robots is the piece-wise constant curvature model, with its consolidated…
A key ingredient to achieving intelligent behavior is physical understanding that equips robots with the ability to reason about the effects of their actions in a dynamic environment. Several methods have been proposed to learn dynamics…
Designing an in-pipe climbing robot that manipulates sharp gears to study complex line relationships. Traditional rolling/happening pipe climbing robots tend to slide when exploring pipe curves. The proposed gearbox connects to the farthest…
Motion control of droplets has generated much attention for its applications to microfluidics, where precise control of small fluid volumes is an imperative requirement. Mechanical vibrations have been shown to be effective at inducing…
Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep…
This paper describes the process and challenges behind the design and development of a micro-gravity enabling aerial robot. The vehicle, designed to provide at minimum 4 seconds of micro-gravity at an accuracy of .001 g's, is designed with…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
In this paper, we propose and demonstrate an adaptive-sliding mode control for trajectory tracking control of robot manipulators subjected to uncertain dynamics, vibration disturbance, and payload variation disturbance. Throughout this work…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
To build commercial robots, skid-steering mechanical design is of increased popularity due to its manufacturing simplicity and unique mechanism. However, these also cause significant challenges on software and algorithm design, especially…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the…
The functional demands of robotic systems often require completing various tasks or behaviors under the effect of disturbances or uncertain environments. Of increasing interest is the autonomy for dynamic robots, such as multirotors, motor…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…