Related papers: Mechanical principles of dynamic terrestrial self-…
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…
Passive tumbling uses natural forces like gravity for efficient travel. But without an active means of control, passive tumblers must rely entirely on external forces. Northeastern University's COBRA is a snake robot that can morph into a…
Mobile robots have received a great deal of research in recent years. A significant amount of research has been published in many aspects related to mobile robots. Most of the research is devoted to design and develop some control…
In comparison with existing approaches, which struggle with scalability, communication dependency, and robustness against dynamic failures, cooperative aerial transportation via robot swarms holds transformative potential for logistics and…
Wings of flying animals can not only generate lift and control torques but also can sense their surroundings. Such dual functions of sensing and actuation coupled in one element are particularly useful for small sized bio-inspired robotic…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Similarly, snake robots hold the promise as a versatile platform to traverse complex environments like earthquake rubble. Unlike snake locomotion on flat surfaces which is inherently stable, when…
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…
We present a novel controller design on a robotic locomotor that combines an aerial vehicle with a spring-loaded leg. The main motivation is to enable the terrestrial locomotion capability on aerial vehicles so that they can carry heavy…
We study experimentally, numerically and analytically, the dynamics of a chiral active particle (cm-sized robots), pulled at a constant translational velocity. We show that the system can be mapped to a Brownian particle driven across a…
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…
While it is expected to build robotic limbs with multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) inspired by nature, a single DoF design remains fundamental, providing benefits that include, but are not limited to, simplicity, robustness,…
Dynamic manipulation, such as robot tossing or throwing objects, has recently gained attention as a novel paradigm to speed up logistic operations. However, the focus has predominantly been on the object's landing location, irrespective of…
The ability of robots to model their own dynamics is key to autonomous planning and learning, as well as for autonomous damage detection and recovery. Traditionally, dynamic models are pre-programmed or learned from external observations.…
This work presents an actuation framework for a bioinspired flapping drone called Aerobat. This drone, capable of producing dynamically versatile wing conformations, possesses 14 body joints and is tail-less. Therefore, in our robot, unlike…
Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…
Bird-sized flapping-wing robots offer significant potential for agile flight in complex environments, but achieving agile and robust trajectory tracking remains a challenge due to the complex aerodynamics and highly nonlinear dynamics…
The albatross optimized flight maneuver -- known as dynamic soaring -- is nothing but a wonder of biology, physics, and engineering. By utilizing dynamic soaring, the bird can travel in the desired flight direction almost for free by…