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Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…

Field-based reactive control provides a minimalist, decentralized route to guiding robots that lack onboard computation. Such schemes are well suited to resource-limited machines like microrobots, yet implementation artifacts, limited…

Tracking Lagrangian coherent structures in dynamical systems is important for many applications such as oceanography and weather prediction. In this paper, we present a collaborative robotic control strategy designed to track stable and…

We consider a single non-holonomic Dubins-like robot traveling with a constant longitudinal speed in an a priori unknown and unsteady planar environment. The robot should detect, locate, and track the boundary of a dynamic environmental…

Autonomous ocean-exploring vehicles have begun to take advantage of onboard sensor measurements of water properties such as salinity and temperature to locate oceanic features in real time. Such targeted sampling strategies enable more…

Circumnavigation control is useful in real-world applications such as entrapping a hostile target. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous multi-robot system where robots have different physical properties, such as maximum movement…

Trajectory planning is crucial in multi-robot systems, particularly in environments with numerous obstacles. While extensive research has been conducted in this field, the challenge of coordinating multiple robots to flow collectively from…

This paper focuses on coordinating a robot swarm orbiting a convex path without collisions among the individuals. The individual robots lack braking capabilities and can only adjust their courses while maintaining their constant but…

The Modboat is an autonomous surface robot that turns the oscillation of a single motor into a controlled paddling motion through passive flippers. Inertial control methods developed in prior work can successfully drive the Modboat along…

This paper presents a combined sliding-mode control and subspace stabilization methodology for orbital stabilization of periodic trajectories in underactuated mechanical systems with one degree of underactuation. The approach starts with…

Inspired by the octopus and other animals living in water, soft robots should naturally lend themselves to underwater operations, as supported by encouraging validations in deep water scenarios. This work deals with equipping soft arms with…

This paper presents an approach to externally influencing a team of robots by means of time-varying density functions. These density functions represent rough references for where the robots should be located. To this end, a continuous-time…

Many aquatic organisms are able to track ambient flow disturbances and locate their source. These tasks are particularly challenging because they require the organism to sense local flow information and respond accordingly. Details of how…

We consider a single kinematically controlled robot with a bounded control range. The robot travels in a two-dimensional region supporting an unknown unsteady scalar field. A single sensor provides the field value at the current location of…

Continuum robots with floating bases demonstrate exceptional operational capabilities in confined spaces, such as those encountered in medical surgeries and equipment maintenance. However, developing low-cost solutions for their motion and…

Based on machine learning techniques, we propose a novel method to estimate flow fields using only floating sensor locations. This method does not require either ground-truth velocity fields or governing equations for fluid flows, which is…

Efficient mobility and power consumption are critical for autonomous water surface robots in long-term water environmental monitoring. This study develops and evaluates a transformable mobility mechanism for a water surface robot with two…

This paper aims to provide a new problem formulation of path following for mechanical systems without time parameterization nor guidance laws, namely, we express the control objective as an orbital stabilization problem. It is shown that,…

In this study, we use numerical simulations to investigate the flow field induced by a single magnetic microrobot rotating with a constant angular speed about an axis perpendicular to an underlying surface. A parallel solver for steady…

Aerial operation in turbulent environments is a challenging problem due to the chaotic behavior of the flow. This problem is made even more complex when a team of aerial robots is trying to achieve coordinated motion in turbulent wind…