Related papers: RGBlimp: Robotic Gliding Blimp -- Design, Modeling…
Robotic blimps, as lighter-than-air aerial platforms, offer extended operational duration and enhanced safety in human-robot interactions due to their buoyant lift. However, achieving robust flight performance under environmental airflow…
This paper presents the Spinning Blimp, a novel lighter-than-air (LTA) aerial vehicle designed for low-energy stable flight. Utilizing an oblate spheroid helium balloon for buoyancy, the vehicle achieves minimal energy consumption while…
Winged blimps operate across distinct aerodynamic regimes that cannot be adequately captured by a single model. At high speeds and small angles of attack, their dynamics exhibit strong coupling between lift and attitude, resembling…
Lighter-than-air vehicles or blimps, are an evolving platform in robotics with several beneficial properties such as energy efficiency, collision resistance, and ability to work in close proximity to human users. While existing blimp…
Aerial robot solutions are becoming ubiquitous for an increasing number of tasks. Among the various types of aerial robots, blimps are very well suited to perform long-duration tasks while being energy efficient, relatively silent and safe.…
Aerial robots the size of a honeybee (~100 mg) have advantages over larger robots because of their small size, low mass and low materials cost. Previous iterations have demonstrated controlled flight but were difficult to fabricate because…
We present an aerial vehicle composed of a custom quadrotor with tilted rotors and a helium balloon, called SBlimp. We propose a novel control strategy that takes advantage of the natural stable attitude of the blimp to control…
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…
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 blimps, as lighter-than-air (LTA) aerial systems, offer long endurance and inherently safe operation but remain highly susceptible to wind disturbances. Building on recent advances in moving mass actuation, this paper addresses the…
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…
Abdominal Undulation with Compliant Mechanism Improves Flight Performance of Biomimetic Robotic ButterflThis paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental validation of a biomimetic robotic butterfly (BRB) that integrates a…
Advanced machine learning algorithms require platforms that are extremely robust and equipped with rich sensory feedback to handle extensive trial-and-error learning without relying on strong inductive biases. Traditional robotic designs,…
Miniature locomotion robots with the ability to navigate confined environments show great promise for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue operations. Soft miniature locomotion robots, as a burgeoning field, have attracted…
Robots with multi-modal locomotion are an active research field due to their versatility in diverse environments. In this context, additional actuation can provide humanoid robots with aerial capabilities. Flying humanoid robots face…
Designing a controllable airship for non-expert users or preemptively evaluating the performance of desired airships has always been a very challenging problem. This paper explores the blimp design parameter space from the aspect of the…
In this paper, we present a novel rolling, jumping robot. The robot consists of a driven pendulum mounted to a wheel in a compact, lightweight, 3D printed design. We show that by driving the pendulum to shift the robot's weight…
This paper introduces a novel solution to the manual control challenge for indoor blimps. The problem's complexity arises from the conflicting demands of executing human commands while maintaining stability through automatic control for…
Rigid bodies, plastic impact, persistent contact, Coulomb friction, and massless limbs are ubiquitous simplifications introduced to reduce the complexity of mechanics models despite the obvious physical inaccuracies that each incurs…
This study investigates the educational potential of Flappy, a low-cost, bioinspired robotic blimp platform modeled after the motion of manta rays, as a hands-on STEM learning tool for middle school students. Building on prior research…