Related papers: A Geometric Kinematic Model for Flexible Voxel-Bas…

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…

Locomotive soft robots (SoRos) have gained prominence due to their adaptability. Traditional locomotive SoRo design is based on limb structures inspired by biological organisms and requires human intervention. Evolutionary robotics,…

Model generalization of the underlying dynamics is critical for achieving data efficiency when learning for robot control. This paper proposes a novel approach for learning dynamics leveraging the symmetry in the underlying robotic system,…

In this paper, we study applications of the virtual element method (VEM) for simulating the deformation of multiphase composites. The VEM is a Galerkin approach that is applicable to meshes that consist of arbitrarily-shaped polygonal and…

Soft pneumatic actuators are widely used in soft robotics because they can produce large motions while remaining compliant enough to interact safely with objects, environments, and the human body. However, their performance is not solely…

While its biological significance is well-documented, its application in soft robotics, particularly for the transport of fragile and irregularly shaped objects, remains underexplored. This study presents a modular soft robotic actuator…

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…

Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…

We propose in this paper a motion planning method for legged robot locomotion based on Geometric Heat Flow framework. The motion planning task is challenging due to the hybrid nature of dynamics and contact constraints. We encode the hybrid…

Robots will become ubiquitously useful only when they can use few attempts to teach themselves to perform different tasks, even with complex bodies and in dynamical environments. Vertebrates, in fact, successfully use trial-and-error to…

Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…

This paper presents a novel approach that combines the advantages of both model-based and learning-based frameworks to achieve robust locomotion. The residual modules are integrated with each corresponding part of the model-based framework,…

Developing a framework for the locomotion of a six-legged robot or a hexapod is a complex task that has extensive hardware and computational requirements. In this paper, we present a bio-inspired framework for the locomotion of a hexapod.…

Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…

Lattice models are popular methods for simulating deformation of solids by discretizing continuum structures into spring networks. Despite the simplicity and efficiency, most lattice models only rigorously converge to continuum models for…

Roboticists have been seeking to address this situation in recent years through the use of soft robots. Unfortunately, identifying appropriate models for the complete analysis and investigation of soft robots for design and control purposes…

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…

Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…

In many systems motion occurs on deformed and deformable surfaces, setting up the possibility for dynamical interactions solely mediated by the coupling of the entities with their environment. Here we study the "two-body" dynamics of robot…

The structural complexity of metamaterials is limitless, although in practice, most designs comprise periodic architectures which lead to materials with spatially homogeneous features. More advanced tasks, arising in e.g. soft robotics,…