Related papers: Nematic colloidal micro-robots as physically intel…
Flexible robots may overcome some of the industry's major challenges, such as enabling intrinsically safe human-robot collaboration and achieving a higher payload-to-mass ratio. However, controlling flexible robots is complicated due to…
Planning locomotion trajectories for legged microrobots is challenging because of their complex morphology, high frequency passive dynamics, and discontinuous contact interactions with their environment. Consequently, such research is often…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
Small-scale robots hold great potential for targeted cargo delivery in minimally-inv asive medicine. However, current robots often face challenges to locomote efficiently on slip pery biological tissue surfaces, especially when loaded with…
Robotic technologies have been an indispensable part for improving human productivity since they have been helping humans in completing diverse, complex, and intensive tasks in a fast yet accurate and efficient way. Therefore, robotic…
Generation of robust trajectories for legged robots remains a challenging task due to the underlying nonlinear, hybrid and intrinsically unstable dynamics which needs to be stabilized through limited contact forces. Furthermore,…
Snapping instabilities in soft structures offer a powerful pathway to achieve rapid and energy-efficient actuation. In this study, an eccentric dome-shaped snapping actuator is developed to generate controllable asymmetric motion through…
This paper presents a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) toward versatile motion generation for the telescopic-wheeled-legged robot Tachyon 3, the unique hardware structure of which poses challenges in control and motion planning. We…
We explore micropatterned director structures of aqueous lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal (LCLC) films created on square lattice cylindrical-micropost substrates. The structures are manipulated by modulating the LCLC mesophases and their…
Through the utilization of smart materials and well-designed structures, functional surfaces have been developed to enable small-scale liquid/solid manipulation tasks, thereby facilitating crucial applications in the fields of…
Natural active systems routinely reshape and reorganize their environments through sustained local interactions. Examples of decentralized collective construction are common in nature, e.g., many insects achieve large-scale constructions…
Swimming microrobots are increasingly developed with complex materials and dynamic shapes and are expected to operate in complex environments in which the system dynamics are difficult to model and positional control of the microrobot is…
Liquid crystals establish a nearly unique combination of thermodynamic, hydrodynamic, and topological behavior. This poses a challenge to their theoretical understanding and modeling. The arena where these effects come together is the…
Physical properties of composite materials can be pre-engineered by controlling their structure and composition at the mesoscale. Yet, approaches for achieving this are limited and rarely scalable. We introduce a new breed of self-assembled…
Advanced machine learning algorithms require platforms that are extremely robust and equipped with rich sensory feedback to handle extensive trial-and-error learning without relying on strong inductive biases. Traditional robotic designs,…
Modern robotic systems are endowed with superior mobility and mechanical skills that make them suited to be employed in real-world scenarios, where interactions with heavy objects and precise manipulation capabilities are required. For…
This paper introduces CognitiveDog, a pioneering development of quadruped robot with Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) that is capable of not only communicating with humans verbally but also physically interacting with the environment through…
Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…
Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…
We analyse the neural dynamics and its relation with the emergent behaviour of a robotic vehicle that is controlled by a neural network numerical simulation based on the nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. The robot…