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Granular jamming has recently become popular in soft robotics with widespread applications including industrial gripping, surgical robotics and haptics. Previous work has investigated the use of various techniques that exploit the nature of…
This research focuses on developing reinforcement learning approaches for the locomotion generation of small-size quadruped robots. The rat robot NeRmo is employed as the experimental platform. Due to the constrained volume, small-size…
Modularity in robotics holds great potential. In principle, modular robots can be disassembled and reassembled in different robots, and possibly perform new tasks. Nevertheless, actually exploiting modularity is yet an unsolved problem:…
Soft lubrication has been shown to drastically affect the mobility of an object immersed in a viscous fluid in the vicinity of a purely elastic wall. In this theoretical study, we develop a minimal model incorporating viscoelasticity,…
This paper deals with the vibration of granular materials due to cyclic external excitation. It highlights the effect of the acceleration on the settlement speed and proves the existence of a relationship between settlement and loss of…
The transport of sediments by a fluid flow is commonly found in nature and in industry. In nature, it is found in rivers, oceans, deserts, and other environments. In industry, it is found in petroleum pipelines conveying grains, in sewer…
Having the advantage of being relatively fast and powerful, as well as readily fabricated, spherical bubble-propelled microrobots are particularly well suited for applications such as cargo delivery, micromanipulation, and biological or…
Voxel-based structures provide a modular, mechanically flexible periodic lattice which can be used as a soft robot through internal deformations. To engage these structures for robotic tasks, we use a finite element method to characterize…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Animals, such as birds, widely use multi-modal locomotion by combining legged and aerial mobility with dominant inertial effects. The robotic biomimicry of this multi-modal locomotion feat can yield ultra-flexible systems in terms of their…
Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve…
Biped robots are inherently unstable because of their complex kinematics as well as dynamics. Despite the many research efforts in developing biped locomotion, the performance of biped locomotion is still far from the expectations. This…
Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that…
We experimentally investigate the in-plane rotational motion of ferromagnetic colloidal rods immersed in viscoelastic media and subjected to a rotating magnetic field. Unexpectedly, we observe significant angular velocity even at field…
We show from experiments and simulations on vibration-activated granular matter that self-propelled polar rods in an elastic medium on a substrate turn and move towards each other. We account for this effective attraction through a…
Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with vision traversing more challenging environments. These…
In this review we argue for the creation of a physics of moving systems -- a locomotion "robophysics" -- which we define as the pursuit of the discovery of principles of self generated motion. Robophysics can provide an important…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Navigating rugged landscapes poses significant challenges for legged locomotion. Multi-legged robots (those with 6 and greater) offer a promising solution for such terrains, largely due to their inherent high static stability, resulting…
This work explores the potential of using differentiable simulation for learning quadruped locomotion. Differentiable simulation promises fast convergence and stable training by computing low-variance first-order gradients using robot…