Related papers: Study on Soft Robotic Pinniped Locomotion

Safety concerns during the operation of legged robots must be addressed to enable their widespread use. Machine learning-based control methods that use model-based constraints provide promising means to improve robot safety. This study…

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…

Humanoids are versatile robotic platforms owing to their limbs with multiple degrees of freedom. Although humanoids can walk like humans, they are relatively slow, and cannot run over large barriers. To address these limitations, we aim to…

Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…

As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…

Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain…

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…

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…

This work tries to contribute to the design of legged robots with capabilities boosted through thruster-assisted locomotion. Our long-term goal is the development of robots capable of negotiating unstructured environments, including land…

Legged locomotion shows promise for running in complex, unstructured environments. Designing such legged robots requires considering heterogeneous, multi-domain constraints and variables, from mechanical hardware and geometry choices to…

Achieving effective locomotion on diverse terrestrial substrates can require subtle changes of limb kinematics. Biologically inspired legged robots (physical models of organisms) have shown impressive mobility on hard ground but suffer…

Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…

Snakes are a remarkable evolutionary success story. Many snake-inspired robots have been proposed over the years. Soft robotic snakes (SRS) with their continuous and smooth bending capability better mimic their biological counterparts'…

This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…

Robot feet are crucial for maintaining dynamic stability and propelling the body during walking, especially on uneven terrains. Traditionally, robot feet were mostly designed as flat and stiff pieces of metal, which meets its limitations…

Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…

Legged robots are well-suited for broad exploration tasks in complex environments with yielding terrain. Understanding robotic foot-terrain interactions is critical for safe locomotion and walking efficiency for legged robots. This paper…

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…