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Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Bipedal robots adapt to the environment of the modern society due to the similarity of movement to humans, and therefore they are a good partner for humans. However, maintaining the stability of these robots during walking/running motion is…
As a complementary tool to laboratory experiments, discrete numerical simulation, applied to granular materials, provides valuable information on the grain and contact scale microstructure, thereby enabling one to better understand the…
Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and…
We explore the locomotion of soft robots in granular medium (GM) resulting from the elastic deformation of slender rods. A low-cost, rapidly fabricable robot inspired by the physiological structure of bacteria is presented. It consists of a…
A rigid-flexible manipulator may be assigned tasks in a moving environment where the winds or vibrations affect the position and/or orientation of surface of operation. Consequently, losses of the contact and perhaps degradation of the…
Soft continuum robots achieve complex deformation through elastic equilibrium, making their reachable motions governed jointly by structural design and actuation-induced mechanics. This work develops a general formulation that integrates…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
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…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
This paper discusses the utility of using simple stiffness and vibrations models, based on the Jacobian matrix of a manipulator and only the rigidity of the actuators, whenever its geometry is optimised. In many works, these simplified…
Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…
Accurate deformable object manipulation (DOM) is essential for achieving autonomy in robotic surgery, where soft tissues are being displaced, stretched, and dissected. Many DOM methods can be powered by simulation, which ensures realistic…
SLOT (Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot with 3D-printed TPU legs, is presented to study physics-informed modeling and control of compliant legged locomotion using only four actuators. Each leg is…
Research on the co-optimization of soft robotic design and control requires rapid means for real-world validation. Existing creation pipelines do not allow for the swift prototyping of soft robots to quickly test various design…
One of the essential aspects of humanoid robot running is determining the limb-swinging trajectories. During the flight phases, where the ground reaction forces are not available for regulation, the limb swinging trajectories are…
Sliding tasks performed by aerial robots are valuable for inspection and simple maintenance tasks at height, such as non-destructive testing and painting. Although various end-effector designs have been used for such tasks, non-actuated…
Complex motions for robots are frequently generated by switching among a collection of individual movement primitives. We use this approach to formulate robot motion plans as sequences of primitives to be executed one after the other. When…
Designing a robot or structure that can fold itself into a target shape is a process that involves challenges originated from multiple sources. For example, the designer of rigid self-folding robots must consider foldability from geometric…
Commonly used linear and nonlinear constitutive material models in deformation simulation contain many simplifications and only cover a tiny part of possible material behavior. In this work we propose a framework for learning customized…