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Untethered soft robots that locomote using electrothermally-responsive materials like shape memory alloy (SMA) face challenging design constraints for sensing actuator states. At the same time, modeling of actuator behaviors faces steep…
In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…
Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…
Endovascular technique has many advantages but relies strongly on operator skills and experience. Robotically steerable catheters have been developed but few are clinically available. We describe here the development of an active and…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
This paper introduces a new type of soft continuum robot, called SCoReS, which is capable of self-controlling continuously its curvature at the segment level; in contrast to previous designs which either require external forces or machine…
Soft robotic actuators are safe and adaptable devices with inherent compliance, which makes them attractive for manipulating delicate and complex objects. Researchers have integrated stiff materials into soft actuators to increase their…
A remarkable variety of organisms use metachronal coordination (i.e., numerous neighboring appendages beating sequentially with a fixed phase lag) to swim or pump fluid. This coordination strategy is used by microorganisms to break symmetry…
Spring-based actuators in legged locomotion provide energy-efficiency and improved performance, but increase the difficulty of controller design. While previous work has focused on extensive modeling and simulation to find optimal…
This paper represents an adaptive rhythmic control for a snake-like robot with 25 degrees of freedom. The adaptive gait control is implemented in algorithmic way in simulation and on a real robot. We investigated behavioral and energetic…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
In this paper, we propose a novel design of a hybrid mobile robot with controllable stiffness and deformable shape. Compared to conventional mobile agents, our system can switch between rigid and compliant phases by solidifying or melting…
Musculoskeletal robots offer intrinsic compliance and flexibility, providing a promising paradigm for versatile locomotion. However, existing research typically relies on models with fixed muscle physiological parameters. This static…
In this paper, a reinforced soft robot prototype with a custom-designed actuator-space string encoder are created to investigate dynamic soft robotic trajectory tracking. The soft robot prototype embedded with the proposed adaptive…
A major field of industrial robot applications deals with repetitive tasks that alternate between operating points. For these so-called pick-and-place operations, parallel kinematic manipulators (PKM) are frequently employed. These tasks…
This work presents a novel Shape Memory Alloy spring actuated continuum robotic neck that derives inspiration from pennate muscle architecture. The proposed design has 2DOF, and experimental studies reveal that the designed joint can…
In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for a snake robot to move straight up a cylindrical surface. Prior works on pole-climbing for a snake robot mainly utilized a rolling helix gait, and although proven to be efficient, it does not…
Continuum robots exhibit high-dimensional, nonlinear dynamics which are often coupled with their actuation mechanism. Spectral submanifold (SSM) reduction has emerged as a leading method for reducing high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…