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Bipedal robots are a fascinating and advanced category of robots designed to mimic human form and locomotion. The development of the bipedal robots is a significant milestone in robotics. However, even the most advanced bipedal robots are…
Application of soft and compliant joints in grasping mechanisms received an increasing attention during recent years. This article suggests the design and development of a novel bio-inspired compliant finger which is composed of a 3D…
Imitation learning has been actively studied in recent years. In particular, skill acquisition by a robot with a fixed body, whose root link position and posture and camera angle of view do not change, has been realized in many cases. On…
Grasping is an incredible ability of animals using their arms and limbs in their daily life. The human hand is an especially astonishing multi-fingered tool for precise grasping, which helped humans to develop the modern world. The…
Typically, AI researchers and roboticists try to realize intelligent behavior in machines by tuning parameters of a predefined structure (body plan and/or neural network architecture) using evolutionary or learning algorithms. Another but…
The logarithmic spiral is observed as a common pattern in several living beings across kingdoms and species. Some examples include fern shoots, prehensile tails, and soft limbs like octopus arms and elephant trunks. In the latter cases,…
Traditional robotic mechanisms contain a series of rigid links connected by rotational joints that provide powered motion, all of which is controlled by a central processor. By contrast, analogous mechanisms found in nature, such as octopus…
Limbless locomotors, from microscopic worms to macroscopic snakes, traverse complex, heterogeneous natural environments typically using undulatory body wave propagation. Theoretical and robophysical models typically emphasize body…
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are both based on the tenet of "science and technology are people-oriented", and both need to achieve efficient communication with the human brain. Based on multi-disciplinary…
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…
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…
We propose a novel tri-fingered soft robotic gripper with decoupled stiffness and shape control capability for performing adaptive grasping with minimum system complexity. The proposed soft fingers adaptively conform to object shapes…
Plasmodium of \emph{Physarum polycephalum} is a single huge (visible by naked eye) cell with myriad of nuclei. The plasmodium is a promising substrate for non-classical, nature-inspired, computing devices. It is capable for approximation of…
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…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Grasping deformable objects is not well researched due to the complexity in modelling and simulating the dynamic behavior of such objects. However, with the rapid development of physics-based simulators that support soft bodies, the…
The versatility of humanoid robots in locomotion, full-body motion, interaction with unmodified human environments, and intuitive human-robot interaction led to increased research interest. Multiple smaller platforms are available for…
Traditional rigid underwater vehicles pose risks to delicate marine ecosystems due to high-speed propellers and rigid hulls. This paper presents BactoBot, a low-cost, soft underwater robot designed for safe and gentle marine exploration.…
In the approximately century-long journey of robotics, humanoid robots made their debut around six decades ago. While current humanoids bear human-like appearances, none have embodied true humaneness, remaining distant from achieving…