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Biped robots have plenty of benefits over wheeled, quadruped, or hexapod robots due to their ability to behave like human beings in tough and non-flat environments. Deformable terrain is another challenge for biped robots as it has to deal…
Aerial robotic arms aim to enable inspection and environment interaction in otherwise hard-to-reach areas from the air. However, many aerial manipulators feature bulky or heavy robot manipulators mounted to large, high-payload aerial…
Autonomous mobile robots have the potential to solve missions that are either too complex or dangerous to be accomplished by humans. In this paper, we address the design and autonomous deployment of a ground vehicle equipped with a robotic…
Flying manipulators are aerial drones with attached rigid-bodied robotic arms and belong to the latest and most actively developed research areas in robotics. The rigid nature of these arms often lack compliance, flexibility, and smoothness…
Model-based manipulation of deformable objects has traditionally dealt with objects while neglecting their dynamics, thus mostly focusing on very lightweight objects at steady state. At the same time, soft robotic research has made…
Multimodal locomotion is crucial for an animal's adaptability in unstructured wild environments. Similarly, in the human gastrointestinal tract, characterized by viscoelastic mucus, complex rugae, and narrow sphincters like the cardia,…
Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been actively studied as moving cloudlets to provide application offloading opportunities and to enhance the security level of user equipments (UEs). In this correspondence, we propose a hybrid UAV-aided…
Soft robotic systems present a variety of new opportunities for solving complex problems. The use of soft robotic grippers, for example, can simplify the complexity in tasks such as the of grasping irregular and delicate objects. Adoption…
Soft mobile robots have emerged as a promising area of research with potential applications in various disciplines including but not limited to search-and-rescue, service, surveillance, explorations, and manufacturing. In this article, we…
Achieving controlled jumping behaviour for a quadruped robot is a challenging task, especially when introducing passive compliance in mechanical design. This study addresses this challenge via imitation-based deep reinforcement learning…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
Autonomous docking between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and ground robots is essential for heterogeneous systems, yet most existing approaches target wheeled platforms whose limited mobility constrains exploration in complex terrains.…
This paper proposes a simple strategy for sim-to-real in Deep-Reinforcement Learning (DRL) -- called Roll-Drop -- that uses dropout during simulation to account for observation noise during deployment without explicitly modelling its…
The operation of multirotors in crowded environments requires a highly reliable takeoff method, as failures during takeoff can damage more valuable assets nearby. The addition of a ballistic launch system imposes a deterministic path for…
Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…
To design a general-purpose assembly robot system that can handle objects of various shapes, we propose a soft jig that fits to the shapes of assembly parts. The functionality of the soft jig is based on a jamming gripper developed in the…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…