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Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…
Despite recent advances in control, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning, developing a unified framework that can achieve agile, precise, and robust whole-body behaviors, particularly in long-horizon tasks, remains challenging.…
As robots become more prevalent, optimizing their design for better performance and efficiency is becoming increasingly important. However, current robot design practices overlook the impact of perception and design choices on a robot's…
Robots are traditionally bounded by a fixed embodiment during their operational lifetime, which limits their ability to adapt to their surroundings. Co-optimizing control and morphology of a robot, however, is often inefficient due to the…
Inspired by spiking neural feedback, we propose a spiking controller for efficient locomotion in a soft robotic crawler. Its bistability, akin to neural fast positive feedback, combined with a sensorimotor slow negative feedback loop,…
Robot designs can take many inspirations from nature, where there are many examples of highly resilient and fault-tolerant locomotion strategies to navigate complex terrains by using multi-functional appendages. For example, Chukar and…
Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts. Imitation learning has emerged as one of the prominent approaches to build such…
Motion mimicking, i.e., encouraging the control policy to mimic human motion, facilitates the learning of complex tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots. Although standard RL frameworks demonstrate impressive locomotion…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…
Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a relatively unstudied problem for robots, including limbless…
In the field of fixed wing aircraft, many morphing technologies have been applied to the wing, such as adaptive airfoil, variable span aircraft, variable swept angle aircraft, etc., but few are aimed at the tail. The traditional fixed wing…
While engineers put lots of effort, resources, and time in building insect scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) that fly like insects, insects themselves are the real masters of flight. What if we would use living insect as platform for MAV…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…
This paper represents an adaptive rhythmic control for a snake-like robot with 25 degrees of freedom. The adaptive gait control is implemented in algorithmic way in simulation and on a real robot. We investigated behavioral and energetic…
This paper proposes a modular framework to generate robust biped locomotion using a tight coupling between an analytical walking approach and deep reinforcement learning. This framework is composed of six main modules which are…
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…
Recently, several approaches have attempted to combine motion generation and control in one loop to equip robots with reactive behaviors, that cannot be achieved with traditional time-indexed tracking controllers. These approaches however…