Related papers: Design of a Flying Humanoid Robot Based on Thrust …
Pneumatically-actuated anthropomorphic robots with high degrees of freedom (DOF) offer significant potential for physical human-robot interaction. However, precise control of pneumatic actuators is challenging due to their inherent…
In this paper, we present a hybrid position/force controller for operating joint robots. The hybrid controller has two goals -- motion tracking and force regulating. As long as these two goals are not mutually exclusive, they can be…
Aerial robots the size of a honeybee (~100 mg) have advantages over larger robots because of their small size, low mass and low materials cost. Previous iterations have demonstrated controlled flight but were difficult to fabricate because…
Hexapod robots are potentially suitable for carrying out tasks in cluttered environments since they are stable, compact, and light weight. They also have multi-joint legs and variable height bodies that make them good candidates for tasks…
High-precision tiny object alignment remains a common and critical challenge for humanoid robots in real-world. To address this problem, this paper proposes a vision-based framework for precisely estimating and controlling the relative…
In this paper we present a study of a specific class of vibration-driven robots: the brushbots. In a bottom-up fashion, we start by deriving dynamic models of the brushes and we discuss the conditions under which these models can be…
Operating robots precisely and at high speeds has been a long-standing goal of robotics research. Balancing these competing demands is key to enabling the seamless collaboration of robots and humans and increasing task performance. However,…
This paper presents, for the first time, the soft planar vertical take-off and landing (Soft-PVTOL) aircraft. This concept captures the soft aerial vehicle's fundamental dynamics with a minimum number of states and inputs but retains the…
Enhancing the explosive power output of the knee joints is critical for improving the agility and obstacle-crossing capabilities of humanoid robots. However, a mismatch between the knee-to-center-of-mass (CoM) transmission ratio and jumping…
Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using…
Selecting robot design parameters can be challenging since these parameters are often coupled with the performance of the controller and, therefore, the resulting capabilities of the robot. This leads to a time-consuming and often expensive…
This work presents methods for the determination of a humanoid robot's joint velocities and accelerations directly from link-mounted Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) each containing a three-axis gyroscope and a three-axis accelerometer. No…
Most birds can navigate seamlessly between aerial and terrestrial environments. Whereas the forelimbs evolved into wings primarily for flight, the hindlimbs serve diverse functions such as walking, hopping, and leaping, and jumping take-off…
Jumping can be an effective way of locomotion to overcome small terrain gaps or obstacles. In this paper we propose two different approaches to perform jumps with a humanoid robot. Specifically, starting from a pre-defined CoM trajectory we…
Though control algorithms for multirotor Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) are well understood, the configuration, parameter estimation, and tuning of flight control algorithms takes quite some time and resources. In previous work, we have shown…
Failure detection and fault tolerant control are fundamental safety features of any aerial vehicle. With the emergence of complex, multi-body flying systems such as jet-powered humanoid robots, it becomes of crucial importance to design…
The purpose of this research is to design, fabricate and test a tendon driven a continuum soft robot with three modular segments, each of which has a tunable stiffness enabled by layer jamming technology. Compared with previous studies, the…
Our goal in this work is to expand the theory and practice of robot locomotion by addressing critical challenges associated with the robotic biomimicry of bat aerial locomotion. Bats wings exhibit fast wing articulation and can mobilize as…
A hierarchical control architecture is presented for energy-efficient control of legged robots subject to variety of linear/nonlinear inequality constraints such as Coulomb friction cones, switching unilateral contacts, actuator saturation…
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative transport of a point mass hoisted by two aerial robots. Treating the robots as a leader and a follower, the follower stabilizes the system with respect to the leader using only feedback from…