Related papers: MIRRAX: A Reconfigurable Robot for Limited Access …
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,…
Robotic systems are routinely used in the logistics industry to enhance operational efficiency, but the design of robot workspaces remains a complex and manual task, which limits the system's flexibility to changing demands. This paper aims…
A nonholonomic under-actuated robot with a bounded control range travels inside an unknown and unstructured 3D tunnel bounded by a generic 2D surface. The robot has access to the nearest point of the surface and measures the distance to the…
Legged robots have shown remarkable advantages in navigating uneven terrain. However, realizing effective locomotion and manipulation tasks on quadruped robots is still challenging. In addition, object and terrain parameters are generally…
Modular small-scale robots offer the potential for on-demand assembly and disassembly, enabling task-specific adaptation in dynamic and constrained environments. However, existing modular magnetic platforms often depend on workspace…
A mobile robot represented by a point moving in the plane has to explore an unknown terrain with obstacles. Both the terrain and the obstacles are modeled as arbitrary polygons. We consider two scenarios: the unlimited vision, when the…
Robotic arms are essential to modern industries, however, their adaptability to unstructured environments remains limited. Soft robotic arms, particularly those actuated pneumatically, offer greater adaptability in unstructured environments…
Soft robots are notoriously hard to control. This is partly due to the scarcity of models able to capture their complex continuum mechanics, resulting in a lack of control methodologies that take full advantage of body compliance. Currently…
Autonomous navigation of steel bridge inspection robots is essential for proper maintenance. The majority of existing robotic solutions for bridge inspection require human intervention to assist in the control and navigation. In this paper,…
Social robots must adjust to human proxemic norms to ensure user comfort and engagement. While prior research demonstrates that eye-tracking features reliably estimate comfort in human-human interactions, their applicability to interactions…
The paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the…
In the last years, several hierarchical frameworks have been proposed to deal with highly-redundant robotic systems. Some of that systems are expected to perform multiple tasks and physically to interact with the environment. However, none…
Exploration and mapping of unknown environments is a fundamental task in applications for autonomous robots. In this article, we present a complete framework for deploying MAVs in autonomous exploration missions in unknown subterranean…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
OpenRoACH is a 15-cm 200-gram self-contained hexapedal robot with an onboard single-board computer. To our knowledge, it is the smallest legged robot with the capability of running the Robot Operating System (ROS) onboard. The robot is…
The quality of the visual feedback can vary significantly on a legged robot that is meant to traverse unknown and unstructured terrains. The map of the environment, acquired with online state-of-the-art algorithms, often degrades after a…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…
Mobile robots are ubiquitous. Such vehicles benefit from well-designed and calibrated control algorithms ensuring their task execution under precise uncertainty bounds. Yet, in tasks involving humans in the loop, such as elderly or mobility…
Most of the quadrupeds developed are highly actuated, and their control is hence quite cumbersome. They need advanced electronics equipment to solve convoluted inverse kinematic equations continuously. In addition, they demand special and…
Traversing terrains with sparse footholds like legged animals presents a promising yet challenging task for quadruped robots, as it requires precise environmental perception and agile control to secure safe foot placement while maintaining…