Related papers: SMORS: A soft multirotor UAV for multimodal locomo…
Aerial robots are evolving from avoiding obstacles to exploiting the environmental contact interactions for navigation, exploration and manipulation. A key challenge in such aerial physical interactions lies in handling uncertain contact…
This paper presents the design of a small aerial robot for inhabited microgravity environments, such as orbiting space stations (e.g., ISS). In particular, we target a fleet of robots, called Space CoBots, for collaborative tasks with…
Nowadays, design and development of legged quadruped robots is a quite active area of scientific research. In fact, the legged robots have become popular due to their capabilities to adapt to harsh terrains and diverse environmental…
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…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
This work represents an initial benchmark of a large-scale soft robot performing physical, collaborative manipulation of a long, extended object with a human partner. The robot consists of a pneumatically-actuated, three-link continuum soft…
A deformable land-air robot is introduced with excellent driving and flying capabilities, offering a smooth switching mechanism between the two modes. An elaborate coupled dynamics model is established for the robot, including rotors,…
Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
The ability of robotic grippers to not only grasp but also re-position and re-orient objects in-hand is crucial for achieving versatile, general-purpose manipulation. While recent advances in soft robotic grasping has greatly improved grasp…
Extending the maneuverability of unmanned areal vehicles promises to yield a considerable increase in the areas in which these systems can be used. Some such applications are the performance of more complicated inspection tasks and the…
Development of applications related to closed-loop control requires either testing on the field or on a realistic simulator, with the latter being more convenient, inexpensive, safe, and leading to shorter development cycles. To address…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Soft robots can safely interact with environments because of their mechanical compliance. Self-collision is also employed in the modern design of soft robots to enhance their performance during different tasks. However, developing an…
The introduction of fully-actuated multirotors has opened the door to new possibilities and more efficient solutions to many real-world applications. However, their integration had been slower than expected, partly due to the need for new…
For legged robots, aerial motions are the only option to overpass obstacles that cannot be circumvent with standard locomotion gaits. In these cases, the robot must perform a leap to either jump onto the obstacle or fly over it. However,…
Soft robots have struggled to support large forces and moments while also supporting their own weight against gravity. This limits their ability to reach certain configurations necessary for tasks such as inspection and pushing objects up.…
Recent advances in foundation models have shown promising results in developing generalist robotics that can perform diverse tasks in open-ended scenarios given multimodal inputs. However, current work has been mainly focused on indoor,…
Although recent years have seen significant progress of humanoid robots in walking and running, the frequent foot strikes with ground during these locomotion gaits inevitably generate high instantaneous impact forces, which leads to…
We present a new open-source torque-controlled legged robot system, with a low-cost and low-complexity actuator module at its core. It consists of a high-torque brushless DC motor and a low-gear-ratio transmission suitable for impedance and…