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We reexamine non-Einsteinian effects observable in the orbital motion of low-orbit artificial Earth satellites. The motivations for doing so are twofold: (i) recent theoretical studies suggest that the correct theory of gravity might…
Simulation engines are widely adopted in robotics. However, they lack either full simulation control, ROS integration, realistic physics, or photorealism. Recently, synthetic data generation and realistic rendering has advanced tasks like…
Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal…
We offer a brief survey of existent and planned experimental tests for quantum gravity. First, we outline the questions we wish to address, and then introduce some of the phenomenological models that are currently used in quantum gravity,…
The growing ambition for space exploration demands robust autonomous systems that can operate in unstructured environments under extreme extraterrestrial conditions. The adoption of robot learning in this domain is severely hindered by the…
Risk assessment of a robot in controlled environments, such as laboratories and proving grounds, is a common means to assess, certify, validate, verify, and characterize the robots' safety performance before, during, and even after their…
Off-road navigation is an important capability for mobile robots deployed in environments that are inaccessible or dangerous to humans, such as disaster response or planetary exploration. Progress is limited due to the lack of a…
This paper addresses two intertwined needs for collaborative robots operating in shop-floor environments. The first is the ability to perform complex manipulation operations, such as those on articulated or even flexible objects, in a way…
In this paper, we present an experiment, designed to investigate and evaluate the scalability and the robustness aspects of mobile manipulation. The experiment involves performing variations of mobile pick and place actions and…
The Mini Wheelbot is a balancing, reaction wheel unicycle robot designed as a testbed for learning-based control. It is an unstable system with highly nonlinear yaw dynamics, non-holonomic driving, and discrete contact switches in a small,…
Shake tables serve as a critical tool for simulating earthquake events and testing the response of structures to seismic forces. However, existing shake tables are either expensive or proprietary. This paper presents the design and…
Validation of robotics theory on real-world hardware platforms is important to prove the practical feasibility of algorithms. This paper discusses some of the lessons learned while adapting the EvoBot, a low-cost robotics platform that we…
Robust adaptive control methods are essential for maintaining quadcopter performance under external disturbances and model uncertainties. However, fragmented evaluations across tasks, simulators, and implementations hinder systematic…
Tests and prototyping are vital in the research and development of robotic systems. Work with target hardware is problematic. Hence, in the article, a low-cost, miniaturised physical platform is presented to deal with experiments on…
Currently, mobile robots are developing rapidly and are finding numerous applications in the industry. However, several problems remain related to their practical use, such as the need for expensive hardware and high power consumption…
Learning multiple gaits is non-trivial for legged robots, especially when encountering different terrains and velocity commands. In this work, we present an end-to-end training framework for learning multiple gaits for quadruped robots,…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
This paper improves visual-inertial systems to boost the localization accuracy for low-cost rescue robots. When robots traverse on rugged terrain, the performance of pose estimation suffers from big noise on the measurements of the inertial…
In many systems motion occurs on deformed and deformable surfaces, setting up the possibility for dynamical interactions solely mediated by the coupling of the entities with their environment. Here we study the "two-body" dynamics of robot…
This paper focuses on the development of a ground-based test-bed to analyze the complexities of contact dynamics between multibody systems in space. The test-bed consists of an air-bearing platform equipped with a 7 degrees-of-freedom (one…