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This paper introduces novel air actuated spherical robot called "RollRoller". The RollRoller robot consists of two essential parts: tubes covered with a shell as a frame and mechanical controlling parts to correspond movements. The…
Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…
Collections of simple, self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit complex, emergent dynamical behavior, with promising applications in microrobotics. When confined within a deformable vesicle, self-propelled rods cluster and align,…
In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion…
While the transport of matter by wheeled vehicles or legged robots can be guaranteed in engineered landscapes like roads or rails, locomotion prediction in complex environments like collapsed buildings or crop fields remains challenging.…
We study the compaction and mobility properties of a dense granular material under weak random vibration. By putting in direct contact millimetric glass beads with piezoelectric transducers we manage to inject energy to the system in a…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement…
Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
We investigate a concept of passive, vibration-driven locomotion, in which a mechanical system achieves horizontal self-propulsion by resonantly harvesting energy from vertical environmental excitations (e.g. ambient vibrations of…
We explore the locomotion of soft robots in granular medium (GM) resulting from the elastic deformation of slender rods. A low-cost, rapidly fabricable robot inspired by the physiological structure of bacteria is presented. It consists of a…
Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks,…
This review considers a problem in the development of mobile robot adhesion methods with vertical surfaces and the appropriate locomotion mechanism design. The evolution of adhesion methods for wall-climbing robots (based on friction,…
While the collective motion of active particles has been studied extensively, effective strategies to navigate particle swarms without external guidance remain elusive. We introduce a method to control the trajectories of two-dimensional…
We describe a series of experiments and computer simulations on vibrated granular media in a geometry chosen to eliminate gravitationally induced settling. The system consists of a collection of identical spherical particles on a horizontal…
Mobility on asteroids by multi-limbed climbing robots is expected to achieve our exploration goals in such challenging environments. We propose a mobility strategy to improve the locomotion safety of climbing robots in such harsh…
Limbless organisms of all sizes use undulating patterns of self-deformation to locomote. Geometric mechanics, which maps deformations to motions, provides a powerful framework to formalize and investigate the theoretical properties and…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…
Bristle bots are vibration-driven robots actuated by the motion of an internal oscillating mass. Vibrations are translated into directed locomotion due to the alternating friction resistance between robots' bristles and the substrate during…