Related papers: A robophysical model of spacetime dynamics
We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the…
Simulating curvature due to gravity through warped surfaces is a common visualization aid in Physics education. We reprise a recent experiment exploring orbital trajectories on a precise 3D-printed surface to mimic Newtonian gravity, and…
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…
Traditionally, robots are regarded as universal motion generation machines. They are designed mainly by kinematics considerations while the desired dynamics is imposed by strong actuators and high-rate control loops. As an alternative, one…
A spherical robot has many practical advantages as the entire electronics are protected within a hull and can be carried easily by any Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). However, its use is limited due to finding mounts for sensors. Pendulum…
It is hard to imagine curved spacetimes of General Relativity. A simple but powerful way how to achieve this is visualizing them via embedding diagrams of both ordinary geometry and optical reference geometry. They facilitate to gain an…
Doubly special relativity has been studied for the last twenty years as a way to go beyond the special relativistic kinematics, trying to capture residual effects of a quantum gravity theory. In particular, in doubly special relativity the…
Over the past century, General Relativity (GR) has been a cornerstone of gravitational theory. However, recent cosmological observations, such as the accelerated expansion of the Universe, challenge its completeness and the standard…
Data-driven models of robot motion constructed using principles from Geometric Mechanics have been shown to produce useful predictions of robot motion for a variety of robots. For robots with a useful number of DoF, these geometric…
A new Lorentz gauge gravity model with R^2-type Lagrangian is proposed. In the absence of classical torsion the model admits a topological phase with an arbitrary metric. We analyze the equations of motion in constant curvature space-time…
In this thesis, I investigate how to construct a self-consistent model of deformed general relativity using canonical methods and metric variables. The specific deformation of general covariance is predicted by some studies into loop…
Granular media (GM) present locomotor challenges for terrestrial and extraterrestrial devices because they can flow and solidify in response to localized intrusion of wheels, limbs, and bodies. While the development of airplanes and…
We show that the path of any accelerated body in an arbitrary space-time geometry $g_{\mu\nu}$ can be described as geodesics in a dragged metric $\hat{q}_{\mu\nu}$ that depends only on the background metric and on the motion of the body.…
Stabilizing legged robot locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (DRS) (i.e., rigid surface that moves in the inertial frame) is a complex planning and control problem. The complexity arises due to the hybrid nonlinear walking dynamics…
We construct a model of quantum gravity in which dimension, topology and geometry of spacetime are dynamical. The microscopic degree of freedom is a real rectangular matrix whose rows label internal flavours, and columns label spatial…
Spherical robots typically require at least two actuators to achieve controlled 2D planar motion. Here we present Rollbot, the first spherical robot capable of controllably maneuvering on a 2D plane with a single actuator, challenging this…
Active matter systems use their internal or ambient source of energy and dissipate them at the scale of individual constituent particles to generate motion. Direct measurement of the energy influx for individual particles has not been…
Accurate estimation of the environment structure simultaneously with the robot pose is a key capability of autonomous robotic vehicles. Classical simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms rely on the static world assumption to…
We present a planning and control framework for physics-based manipulation under uncertainty. The key idea is to interleave robust open-loop execution with closed-loop control. We derive robustness metrics through contraction theory. We use…
We derive the equations of motion for relativistic elastic membranes, that is, two-dimensional elastic bodies whose internal energy depends only on their stretching, starting from a variational principle. We show how to obtain conserved…