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Bio-inspired soft robots have already shown the ability to handle uncertainty and adapt to unstructured environments. However, their availability is partially restricted by time-consuming, costly and highly supervised design-fabrication…
Hexapod robots are potentially suitable for carrying out tasks in cluttered environments since they are stable, compact, and light weight. They also have multi-joint legs and variable height bodies that make them good candidates for tasks…
Reconfigurable robot swarms are capable of connecting with each other to form complex structures. Current mechanical or magnetic connection mechanisms can be complicated to manufacture, consume high power, have a limited load-bearing…
Continuum robots have gained widespread popularity due to their inherent compliance and flexibility, particularly their adjustable levels of stiffness for various application scenarios. Despite efforts to dynamic modeling and control…
Probabilistic Virtual Fixtures (VFs) enable the adaptive selection of the most suitable haptic feedback for each phase of a task, based on learned or perceived uncertainty. While keeping the human in the loop remains essential, for…
Legged robot locomotion on sand slopes is challenging due to the complex dynamics of granular media and how the lack of solid surfaces can hinder locomotion. A promising strategy, inspired by ghost crabs and other organisms in nature, is to…
While most micro-robots face difficulty traveling on rugged and uneven terrain, beetles can walk smoothly on the complex substrate without slipping or getting stuck on the surface due to their stiffness-variable tarsi and expandable hooks…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel…
We propose a novel mechanism that propagates vibration through soft twisted beams, taking advantage of dynamically-coupled anisotropic stiffness to simplify the actuation of walking robots. Using dynamic simulation and experimental…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
We develop a dynamical systems approach to prioritizing and selecting multiple recurring tasks with the aim of conferring a degree of deliberative goal selection to a mobile robot confronted with competing objectives. We take navigation as…
Continuum robots, characterized by their high flexibility and infinite degrees of freedom (DoFs), have gained prominence in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and hazardous environment exploration. However, the intrinsic…
With the increasing deployment of agricultural robots, the traditional manual spray of liquid fertilizer and pesticide is gradually being replaced by agricultural robots. For robotic precision spray application in vegetable farms, accurate…
Reconfigurable robots are at the forefront of robotics innovation due to their unmatched versatility and adaptability in addressing various tasks through collaborative operations. This paper explores the design and implementation of a novel…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
In this paper, I present vectorable thrust control for different locomotion modes by a novel quadruped robot, SPIDAR, equipped with vectoring rotor in each link. First, the robot's unique mechanical design, the dynamics model, and the basic…
A distinctive feature of quadrupeds that is integral to their locomotion is the tail. Tails serve many purposes in biological systems including propulsion, counterbalance, and stabilization while walking, running, climbing, or jumping.…
The recent advancements in nanoscale 3D printing and microfabrication techniques have reinvigorated research on microrobots. However, precise motion control of the microrobots on biological environments using compact actuation setups…
Controlling soft continuum robotic arms is challenging due to their hyper-redundancy and dexterity. In this paper we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop control of the configuration space variables of a soft robotic arm, composed…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are no good dynamic simulation tools to predict the motion or performance of a microrobot as it moves against a substrate. At…