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Bistability and snap-through instabilities are central to various mechanisms in nature and engineering, enabling rapid movement and large shape changes with minimal energy input. These phenomena are easily demonstrated by bending a piece of…
This work tries to contribute to the design of legged robots with capabilities boosted through thruster-assisted locomotion. Our long-term goal is the development of robots capable of negotiating unstructured environments, including land…
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…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
Legged manipulators extend robotic capabilities beyond static manipulation by integrating agile locomotion with versatile arm control. However, achieving precise manipulation while maintaining coordinated locomotion remains a major…
We investigate the effect of wing twist flexibility on lift and efficiency of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle capable of liftoff. Wings used previously were chosen to be fully rigid due to modeling and fabrication constraints. However,…
Bio-inspired multi-joint snake robots offer the advantages of terrain adaptability due to their limbless structure and high flexibility. However, a series of dozens of motor units in typical multiple-joint snake robots results in a heavy…
Wing articulation is critical for efficient flight of bird- and bat-sized animals. Inspired by the flight of $\textit{Cynopterus brachyotis}$, the lesser short-nosed fruit bat, we built a two-degree-of-freedom flapping wing platform with…
Large-scale shape-changing interfaces have great potential, but creating such systems requires substantial time, cost, space, and efforts, which hinders the research community to explore interactions beyond the scale of human hands. We…
We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…
One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
This research proposes a novel morphing structure with shells inspired by the movement of pillbugs. Instead of the pillbug body, a loopcoupled mechanism based on slider-crank mechanisms is utilized to achieve the rolling up and spreading…
This paper introduces a size-adaptable robotic endoscope design, which aims to improve the efficiency and comfort of colonoscopy. The robotic endoscope proposed in this paper combines the expansion mechanism and the external drive system,…
Reconfigurable robot swarms are capable of connecting with each other to form complex structures. Current mechanical or magnetic connection mechanisms can be complicated to manufacture, consume high power, have a limited load-bearing…
Curved thin sheets are ubiquitously found in nature and manmade structures. Within the framework of classical thin plate theory, the stiffness of thin sheets is independent of its bending state. This assumption, however, goes against…
Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
In this paper, we address the development of a robotic rehabilitation system for the upper limbs based on collaborative end-effector solutions. The use of commercial collaborative robots offers significant advantages for this task, as they…
In this paper, we introduce a multi robot payload transport system to carry payloads through an environment of unknown and uneven inclinations while maintaining the desired orientation of the payload. For this task, we used custom built…