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Biological lifeforms can heal, grow, adapt, and reproduce -- abilities essential for sustained survival and development. In contrast, robots today are primarily monolithic machines with limited ability to self-repair, physically develop, or…
There is a dramatic shortage of skilled labor for modern vineyards. The Vinum project is developing a mobile robotic solution to autonomously navigate through vineyards for winter grapevine pruning. This necessitates an autonomous…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…
Robot positioning accuracy is a key factory when performing high-precision manufacturing tasks. To effectively improve the accuracy of a manipulator, often up to a value close to its repeatability, calibration plays a crucial role. In the…
For the majority of tasks performed by traditional serial robot arms, such as bin picking or pick and place, only two or three degrees of freedom (DOF) are required for motion; however, by augmenting the number of degrees of freedom,…
A current problem in the design of small and lightweight autonomous agricultural robots is how to create sufficient traction on soil to pull an agricultural implement or load. One promising solution is offered by the interlock drive system,…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
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…
To build commercial robots, skid-steering mechanical design is of increased popularity due to its manufacturing simplicity and unique mechanism. However, these also cause significant challenges on software and algorithm design, especially…
Endowing continuum robots with compliance while it is interacting with the internal environment of the human body is essential to prevent damage to the robot and the surrounding tissues. Compared with passive compliance, active compliance…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
The characteristic ``in-plane" bending associated with soft robots' deformation make them preferred over rigid robots in sophisticated manipulation and movement tasks. Executing such motion strategies to precision in soft deformable robots…
Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation…
Generating grasp poses is a crucial component for any robot object manipulation task. In this work, we formulate the problem of grasp generation as sampling a set of grasps using a variational autoencoder and assess and refine the sampled…
Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…
A key challenge in scaling up robot learning to many skills and environments is removing the need for human supervision, so that robots can collect their own data and improve their own performance without being limited by the cost of…
Wire-harnessing tasks pose great challenges to be automated by the robot due to the complex dynamics and unpredictable behavior of the deformable wire. Traditional methods, often reliant on dual-robot arms or tactile sensing, face…
The Finite Element Method (FEM) is a powerful modeling tool for predicting the behavior of soft robots. However, its use for control can be difficult for non-specialists of numerical computation: it requires an optimization of the…
Accurate robot kinematics is essential for precise tool placement in articulated robots, but non-geometric factors can introduce configuration-dependent model discrepancies. This paper presents a configuration-dependent kinematic…
Planning accurate manipulation for deformable objects requires prediction of their state. The prediction is often complicated by a loss of stability that may result in collapse of the deformable object. In this work, stability of a fabric…