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Timely transportation of organs, patients, and medical supplies is critical to modern healthcare, particularly in emergencies and transplant scenarios where even short delays can severely impact outcomes. Traditional ground-based vehicles…
Aerial vehicles with collision resilience can operate with more confidence in environments with obstacles that are hard to detect and avoid. This paper presents the methodology used to design a collision resilient aerial vehicle with…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid struts and elastic tendons, provide impact resistance, low mass, and adaptability to unstructured terrain. Their compliance and complex, coupled dynamics, however, present modeling and control…
Soft everting robots present significant advantages over traditional rigid robots, including enhanced dexterity, improved environmental interaction, and safe navigation in unpredictable environments. While soft everting robots have been…
We study the dynamics and the optimization of the shock deceleration supported by a payload when its airborne carrier impacts the ground. We build a nonlinear elastic model for a container prototype and an elastic suspension system for the…
During the last decade, tensegrity systems have been the focus of numerous investigations exploring the possibility of adopting them for planetary landing and exploration applications. Early approaches mainly focused on locomotion aspects…
In an era of rapid urbanization and e-commerce growth, efficient parcel delivery methods are crucial. This paper presents a detailed study of the aerodynamics and sensing analysis of drones for parcel delivery. Utilizing Computational Fluid…
Drones have shown to be useful aerial vehicles for unmanned transport missions such as food and medical supply delivery. This can be leveraged to deliver life-saving nutrition and medicine for people in emergency situations. However,…
One of the biggest perceived challenges in building megastructures, such as the space elevator, is the unavailability of materials with sufficient tensile strength. The presumed necessity of very strong materials stems from a design…
Future robots will navigate perilous, remote environments with resilience and autonomy. Researchers have proposed building robots with compliant bodies to enhance robustness, but this approach often sacrifices the autonomous capabilities…
Cooperative transportation via multiple aerial robots has the potential to support various payloads and reduce the chances of them being dropped. Furthermore, autonomously controlled robots render the system scalable with respect to the…
Due to Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) limitations in processing power and battery lifetime. The tethered UAV (TUAV) offers an attractive approach to answer these shortcomings. Since a tethered connected to UAV is one potential energy…
We introduce collision-resilient aerial vehicles with icosahedron tensegrity structures, capable of surviving high-speed impacts and resuming operations post-collision. We present a model-based design approach, which guides the selection of…
Payload transport over flat terrain via multi-wheel robot carriers is well-understood, highly effective, and configurable. In this paper, our goal is to provide similar effectiveness and configurability for transport over rough terrain that…
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…
Ensuring energy feasibility under wind uncertainty is critical for the safety and reliability of UAV delivery missions. In realistic truck-drone logistics systems, UAVs must deliver parcels and safely return under time-varying wind…
Collaborative aerial transportation of tethered payloads is fundamentally limited by space, power, and weight constraints. Conventional approaches rely on static equilibrium conditions, where each vehicle tilts to generate the forces that…
Electrochemical energy storage (ES) units (e.g. batteries) have been field-validated as an efficient back-up resource that enhance resilience of the distribution system in case of natural disasters. However, using these units for resilience…
The dynamical properties of tensegrity robots give them appealing ruggedness and adaptability, but present major challenges with respect to locomotion control. Due to high-dimensionality and complex contact responses, data-driven approaches…
Purpose: Six million people use crutches as mobile aids in the US. Rigid designs with no axial mobility limit sensory feedback and lead to secondary injury on the upper joints. Spring-loaded designs offer compliance but may compromise…