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Operating in environments too harsh or inaccessible for humans is one of the critical roles expected of robots. However, such environments often pose risks to electronic components as well. To overcome this, various approaches have been…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This paper presents a deformable…
Folding garments reliably and efficiently is a long standing challenge in robotic manipulation due to the complex dynamics and high dimensional configuration space of garments. An intuitive approach is to initially manipulate the garment to…
Automating precision subtasks such as debridement (removing dead or diseased tissue fragments) with Robotic Surgical Assistants (RSAs) such as the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) is challenging due to inherent non-linearities in cable-driven…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
Different subsystems of organisms adapt over many time scales, such as rapid changes in the nervous system (learning), slower morphological and neurological change over the lifetime of the organism (postnatal development), and change over…
Back injuries are the most prevalent work-related musculoskeletal disorders and represent a major cause of disability. Although innovations in wearable robots aim to alleviate this hazard, the majority of existing exoskeletons are obtrusive…
We propose a novel hybrid cable-based robot with manipulator and camera for high-accuracy, medium-throughput plant monitoring in a vertical hydroponic farm and, as an example application, demonstrate non-destructive plant mass estimation.…
Precise robotic grasping is important for many industrial applications, such as assembly and palletizing, where the location of the object needs to be controlled and known. However, achieving precise grasps is challenging due to noise in…
Developing soft robots that can control their own life-cycle and degrade on-demand while maintaining hyper-elasticity is a significant research challenge. On-demand degradable soft robots, which conserve their original functionality during…
Voxel-based structures provide a modular, mechanically flexible periodic lattice which can be used as a soft robot through internal deformations. To engage these structures for robotic tasks, we use a finite element method to characterize…
Fine-grained robot manipulation, such as lifting and rotating a bottle to display the label on the cap, requires robust reasoning about object parts and their relationships with intended tasks. Despite recent advances in training…
The number of mobile robots with constrained computing resources that need to execute complex machine learning models has been increasing during the past decade. Commonly, these robots rely on edge infrastructure accessible over wireless…
In this paper, we propose a novel and distributed formation control method for autonomous robots to follow the desired formation while tracking a moving target in dynamic environments. In our approach, the desired formations, which include…
Continuum arms, such as trunk and tentacle robots, lie between the two extremities of rigid and soft robots and promise to capture the best of both worlds in terms of manipulability, dexterity, and compliance. This paper proposes a new…
Geometrically complex masonry structures (e.g., arches, domes, vaults) are traditionally built with expensive scaffolding or falsework to provide stability during construction. The process of building such structures can potentially be…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
Robotic systems operating in unstructured environments require the ability to switch between compliant and rigid states to perform diverse tasks such as adaptive grasping, high-force manipulation, shape holding, and navigation in…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Robotic Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) is a metal additive manufacturing technology, offering flexible 3D printing while ensuring high quality near-net-shape final parts. However, WAAM also suffers from geometric imprecision,…