Related papers: MIRRAX: A Reconfigurable Robot for Limited Access …
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that can utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying or rolling can overcome these limitations.…
Advances in planetary robotics have led to wheeled robots that have beamed back invaluable science data from the surface of the Moon and Mars. However, these large wheeled robots are unable to access rugged environments such as cliffs,…
This paper introduces a new type of soft continuum robot, called SCoReS, which is capable of self-controlling continuously its curvature at the segment level; in contrast to previous designs which either require external forces or machine…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This paper presents a deformable…
The small size, high dexterity, and intrinsic compliance of continuum robots (CRs) make them well suited for constrained environments. Solving the inverse kinematics (IK), that is finding robot joint configurations that satisfy desired…
Accessibility is one of the most important features in the design of robots and their interfaces. This thesis proposes methods that improve the accessibility of robots for three different target audiences: consumers, researchers, and…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…
We focus on push-based multi-object rearrangement planning using a nonholonomically constrained mobile robot. The simultaneous geometric, kinematic, and physics constraints make this problem especially challenging. Prior work on…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
The inspection of confined critical infrastructure such as attics or crawlspaces is challenging for human operators due to insufficient task space, limited visibility, and the presence of hazardous materials. This paper introduces a…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Inverse kinematics (IK) is the problem of finding robot joint configurations that satisfy constraints on the position or pose of one or more end-effectors. For robots with redundant degrees of freedom, there is often an infinite, nonconvex…
The increasing demand for critical raw materials has revitalized interest in abandoned underground mines, which pose extreme challenges for conventional drilling machinery due to confined, unstructured, and infrastructure-less environments.…
Autonomous navigation is essential for steel bridge inspection robot to monitor and maintain the working condition of steel bridges. Majority of existing robotic solutions requires human support to navigate the robot doing the inspection.…
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…
Individuals with upper limb mobility impairments often require assistive technologies to perform activities of daily living. While gaze-tracking has emerged as a promising method for robotic assistance, existing solutions lack sufficient…