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Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
It has been a great challenge to develop robots that are able to perform complex movement patterns with high speed and, simultaneously, high accuracy. Copepods are animals found in freshwater and saltwater habitats that can have extremely…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Aerial robots the size of a honeybee (~100 mg) have advantages over larger robots because of their small size, low mass and low materials cost. Previous iterations have demonstrated controlled flight but were difficult to fabricate because…
Legged locomotion on flowing ground ({\em e.g.} granular media) is unlike locomotion on hard ground because feet experience both solid- and fluid-like forces during surface penetration. Recent bio-inspired legged robots display speed…
With the emergence of new flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) designs, a need for extensive and advanced mission capabilities arises. FWMAVs try to adapt and emulate the flight features of birds and flying insects. While current…
Biological locomotion, observed in the flexible wings of birds and insects, bodies and fins of aquatic mammals and fishes, consists of their ability to morph the wings/fins. The morphing capability holds significance in the abilities of…
Soft robots offer adaptability and safe interaction with complex environments. Rapid prototyping kits that allow soft robots to be assembled easily will allow different geometries to be explored quickly to suit different environments or to…
Flying robots, such as quadrotor drones, offer new possibilities for human-robot interaction but often pose safety risks due to fast-spinning propellers, rigid structures, and noise. In contrast, lighter-than-air flapping-wing robots,…
Fish-inspired aquatic robots are gaining increasing attention in marine robot communities due to their high swimming speeds and efficient propulsion enabled by flexible bodies that generate undulatory motions. To support the design…
Miniature locomotion robots with the ability to navigate confined environments show great promise for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue operations. Soft miniature locomotion robots, as a burgeoning field, have attracted…
Snapping beams enable rapid geometric transitions through nonlinear instability, offering an efficient means of generating motion in soft robotic systems. In this study, a tendon-driven mechanism consisting of spiral-based metabeams was…
Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This…
In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…
Micro-organisms propel themselves in viscous environments by the periodic, nonreciprocal beating of slender appendages known as flagella. Active materials have been widely exploited to mimic this form of locomotion. However, the realization…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Many swimming and flying animals are observed to cruise in a narrow range of Strouhal numbers, where the Strouhal number ${St = 2fA/U}$ is a dimensionless parameter that relates stroke frequency $f$, amplitude $A$, and forward speed $U$.…
Jumping and hopping locomotion are efficient means of traversing unstructured rugged terrain with the former being the focus of roboticists; a focus that has recently been changing. This focus has led to significant performance and…
Depending on multiple parameters, soft robots can exhibit different modes of locomotion that are difficult to model numerically. As a result, improving their performance is complex, especially in small-scale systems characterized by low…
Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…