Related papers: A Geometric Kinematic Model for Flexible Voxel-Bas…
Continuum and soft robots can leverage complex actuator shapes to take on useful shapes while actuating only a few of their many degrees of freedom. Continuum robots that also grow increase the range of potential shapes that can be actuated…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
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…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
The application of biomechanic and motor control models in the control of bidedal robots (humanoids, and exoskeletons) has revealed limitations of our understanding of human locomotion. A recently proposed model uses the potential energy…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Model-based control usually relies on an accurate model, which is often obtained from CAD and actuator models. The more accurate the model the better the control performance. However, in bipedal robots that demonstrate high agility actions,…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
Soft robots, in contrast to their rigid counter parts, have infinite degrees of freedom that are coupled with their interaction with the environment. We consider the locomotion of an untethered robot, in the granular medium, comprised of…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
Under-actuated compliant robotic systems offer a promising approach to mitigating actuation and control challenges by harnessing pre-designed, embodied dynamic behaviors. This paper presents Flix-Walker, a novel, untethered,…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
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…
When modeling complex robot systems such as branched robots, whose kinematic structures are a tree, current techniques often require modeling the whole structure from scratch, even when partial models for the branches are available. This…
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…
Robots operating in domestic environments generally need to interact with articulated objects, such as doors, cabinets, dishwashers or fridges. In this work, we present a novel, probabilistic framework for modeling articulated objects as…
Many industries extensively use flexible materials. Effective approaches for handling flexible objects with a robot manipulator must address residual vibrations. Existing solutions rely on complex models, use additional instrumentation for…
To generate reliable motion for legged robots through trajectory optimization, it is crucial to simultaneously compute the robot's path and contact sequence, as well as accurately consider the dynamics in the problem formulation. In this…
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…