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Industrial robots are increasingly deployed in applications requiring an end effector tool to closely track a specified path, such as in spraying and welding. Performance and productivity present possibly conflicting objectives: tracking…
Vertebrate animals benefit from a combination of rigidity for structural support and softness for adaptation. Similarly, integrating rigidity and softness can enhance the versatility of soft robotics. However, the challenges associated with…
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,…
Manual pruning is labor intensive and represents up to 25% of annual labor costs in fruit production, notably in apple orchards and vineyards where operational challenges and cost constraints limit the adoption of large-scale machinery. In…
In this paper, we discuss a novel continuum robot design that enables the online tuning of the magnetic response at its tip. The proposed method allows for the change of both effective magnetic direction and intensity, introducing steering…
Pipelines, vital for fluid transport, pose an important yet challenging inspection task, particularly in small, flexible biological systems, that robots have yet to master. In this study, we explored the development of an innovative robot…
Industrial robots are widely used in manufacturing, yet most manipulation still depends on fixed waypoint scripts that are brittle to environmental changes. Learning-based control offers a more adaptive alternative, but it remains unclear…
The precise control of soft and continuum robots requires knowledge of their shape, which has, in contrast to classical rigid robots, infinite degrees of freedom. To partially reconstruct the shape, proprioceptive techniques use built-in…
We introduce an elastic-driven self-folding approach that fabricates robots directly from flat 3D-printed conductive PLA nets. Elastic bands routed through printed hooks store energy that folds the sheet into programmed 3D geometries, while…
Many robot arms can accomplish one task using many different joint configurations. Often only one of these configurations is used as a goal by the path planner. Ideally the robot's path planner would be able to use the extra configurations…
This paper presents a combined task and motion planner for a robot arm to carry out 3D metal wire curving tasks by collaborating with a bending machine. We assume a collaborative robot that is safe to work in a human environment but has a…
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…
Robotic packaging using wrapping paper poses significant challenges due to the material's complex deformation properties. The packaging process itself involves multiple steps, primarily categorized as folding the paper or creating creases.…
Accurate shape sensing, only achievable through distributed proprioception, is a key requirement for closed-loop control of soft robots. Low-cost power efficient optoelectronic sensors manufactured from flexible materials represent a…
Venipucture is a common step in clinical scenarios, and is with highly practical value to be automated with robotics. Nowadays, only a few on-shelf robotic systems are developed, however, they can not fulfill practical usage due to varied…
Can robots mold soft plastic materials by shaping depth images? The short answer is no: current day robots can't. In this article, we address the problem of shaping plastic material with an anthropomorphic arm/hand robot, which observes the…
A hybrid continuum robot design is introduced that combines a proximal tendon-actuated section with a distal telescoping section comprised of permanent-magnet spheres actuated using an external magnet. While, individually, each section can…
Classically, the development of humanoid robots has been sequential and iterative. Such bottom-up design procedures rely heavily on intuition and are often biased by the designer's experience. Exploiting the non-linear coupled design space…
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…
We propose a novel method for autonomous legged robot navigation in densely vegetated environments with a variety of pliable/traversable and non-pliable/untraversable vegetation. We present a novel few-shot learning classifier that can be…