Related papers: MIRRAX: A Reconfigurable Robot for Limited Access …
This study proposes an event-based reconfiguration control to navigate a robot swarm through challenging environments with narrow passages such as valleys, tunnels, and corridors. The robot swarm is modeled as an undirected graph, where…
Robotic surgery for minimally invasive surgery can reduce the surgeon's workload by autonomously guiding robotic forceps. Movement of the robot is restricted around a fixed insertion port. The robot often encounters angle limitations during…
Autonomous navigation in unknown environments is a fundamental challenge in robotics, particularly in coordinating ground and aerial robots to maximize exploration efficiency. This paper presents a novel approach that utilizes a…
Semantic maps allow a robot to reason about its surroundings to fulfill tasks such as navigating known environments, finding specific objects, and exploring unmapped areas. Traditional mapping approaches provide accurate geometric…
Imagine a swarm of terrestrial robots that can explore an environment, and, upon completion of this task, reconfigure into a spherical ball and roll out. This dimensional change alters the dynamics of locomotion and can assist them to…
Reorientation (turning in plane) plays a critical role for all robots in any field application, especially those that in confined spaces. While important, reorientation remains a relatively unstudied problem for robots, including limbless…
Exploration is a critical challenge in robotics, centered on understanding unknown environments. In this work, we focus on robots exploring structured indoor environments which are often predictable and composed of repeating patterns. Most…
Experiments using large numbers of miniature swarm robots are desirable to teach, study, and test multi-robot and swarm intelligence algorithms and their applications. To realize the full potential of a swarm robot, it should be capable of…
The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…
Soft robotics has emerged as a transformative technology in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations, addressing challenges in navigating complex, hazardous environments that often limit traditional rigid robots. This paper critically examines…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
We introduce and analyze a model for self-reconfigurable robots made up of unit-cube modules. Compared to past models, our model aims to newly capture two important practical aspects of real-world robots. First, modules often do not occupy…
Autonomous robotic inspection, where a robot moves through its environment and inspects points of interest, has applications in industrial settings, structural health monitoring, and medicine. Planning the paths for a robot to safely and…
Conventional mobile tensegrity robots constructed with straight links offer mobility at the cost of locomotion speed. While spherical robots provide highly effective rolling behavior, they often lack the stability required for navigating…
This paper presents algorithms to navigate and avoid obstacles for an in-door autonomous mobile robot. A laser range finder is used to obtain 3D images of the environment. A new algorithm, namely 3D-to-2D image pressure and barriers…
An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated…
Robot manipulation in cluttered environments often requires complex and sequential rearrangement of multiple objects in order to achieve the desired reconfiguration of the target objects. Due to the sophisticated physical interactions…
Reconfigurable robots are at the forefront of robotics innovation due to their unmatched versatility and adaptability in addressing various tasks through collaborative operations. This paper explores the design and implementation of a novel…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
Exploration is crucial for enabling legged robots to learn agile locomotion behaviors that can overcome diverse obstacles. However, such exploration is inherently challenging, and we often rely on extensive reward engineering, expert…