Related papers: Air-Releasable Soft Robots for Explosive Ordnance …

Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…

The increasing use of drones in human-centric applications highlights the need for designs that can survive collisions and recover rapidly, minimizing risks to both humans and the environment. We present HoLoArm, a quadrotor with compliant…

Tree fruit growers around the world are facing labor shortages for critical operations, including harvest and pruning. There is a great interest in developing robotic solutions for these labor-intensive tasks, but current efforts have been…

Underwater soft grippers exhibit potential for applications such as monitoring, research, and object retrieval. However, existing underwater gripping techniques frequently cause disturbances to ecosystems. In response to this challenge, we…

Autonomous drones must often respond to sudden events, such as alarms, faults, or unexpected changes in their environment, that require immediate and adaptive decision-making. Traditional approaches rely on safety engineers hand-coding…

Today's robotic systems are increasingly turning to computationally expensive models such as deep neural networks (DNNs) for tasks like localization, perception, planning, and object detection. However, resource-constrained robots, like…

Landmine detection using traditional methods is slow, dangerous and prohibitively expensive. Using deep learning-based object detection algorithms drone videos is promising but has multiple challenges due to the small, soda-can size of…

Drone light shows have emerged as a popular form of entertainment in recent years. However, several high-profile incidents involving large-scale drone failures -- where multiple drones simultaneously fall from the sky -- have raised safety…

A chaser satellite equipped with robotic arms can capture space debris and manipulate it for use in more advanced missions such as refueling and deorbiting. To facilitate capturing, a caging-based strategy has been proposed to simplify the…

Inverted landing in a rapid and robust manner is a challenging feat for aerial robots, especially while depending entirely on onboard sensing and computation. In spite of this, this feat is routinely performed by biological fliers such as…

Micro aerial vehicles are becoming increasingly important in search and rescue operations due to their agility, speed, and ability to access confined spaces or hazardous areas. However, designing lightweight aerial systems presents…

Growing robots based on the eversion principle are known for their ability to extend rapidly, from within, along their longitudinal axis, and, in doing so, reach deep into hitherto inaccessible, remote spaces. Despite many advantages,…

Soft robotic manipulators are attractive for a range of applications such as medical interventions or industrial inspections in confined environments. A myriad of soft robotic manipulators have been proposed in the literature, but their…

Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…

Cooperative transportation via multiple aerial robots has the potential to support various payloads and reduce the chances of them being dropped. Furthermore, autonomously controlled robots render the system scalable with respect to the…

Transporting suspended payloads is challenging for autonomous aerial vehicles because the payload can cause significant and unpredictable changes to the robot's dynamics. These changes can lead to suboptimal flight performance or even…

Thanks to their compliance and adaptability, soft robots can be deployed to perform tasks in constrained or complex environments. In these scenarios, spatial awareness of the surroundings and the ability to localize the robot within the…

Landmines remain a threat to war-affected communities for years after conflicts have ended, partly due to the laborious nature of demining tasks. Humanitarian demining operations begin by collecting relevant information from the sites to be…

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…

Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…