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Soft robotics has emerged as a transformative technology in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations, addressing challenges in navigating complex, hazardous environments that often limit traditional rigid robots. This paper critically examines…
While most micro-robots face difficulty traveling on rugged and uneven terrain, beetles can walk smoothly on the complex substrate without slipping or getting stuck on the surface due to their stiffness-variable tarsi and expandable hooks…
An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations…
The search for extraterrestrial life has long been a primary focus of scientific exploration, driven by rapid advancements in technology and our understanding of the universe. The discovery of water on Mars has sparked significant interest,…
Asteroid mining can become an enabling technology to establish a sustainable manned colony on Mars, which requires metallic materials more often than they are readily available in shipments from Earth. This paper describes a feasibility…
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…
Planetary rover missions must utilize machine learning-based perception to continue extra-terrestrial exploration with little to no human presence. Martian terrain segmentation has been critical for rover navigation and hazard avoidance to…
Rover localization is one of the perquisites for large scale rover exploration. In NASA's Mars 2020 mission, the Ingenuity helicopter is carried together with the rover, which is capable of obtaining high-resolution imagery of Mars terrain,…
In order for off-Earth top surface structures built from regolith to protect astronauts from radiation, they need to be several meters thick. Technical University Delft (TUD) proposes to excavate into the ground to create subsurface…
A vast number of applications for legged robots entail tasks in complex, dynamic environments. But these environments put legged robots at high risk for limb damage. This paper presents an empirical study of fault tolerant dynamic gaits…
This work presents the computational design and validation of the Multi-Arm Relocatable Manipulator (MARM), a three-limb robot for space applications, with particular reference to the MIRROR (i.e., the Multi-arm Installation Robot for…
The Mars thermosphere holds clues to the evolution of the Martian climate, and has practical implications for spacecraft visiting Mars, which often use it for aerobraking upon arrival, or for landers, which must pass through it.…
Collaborative multiple robots for unknown environment exploration have become mainstream due to their remarkable performance and efficiency. However, most existing methods assume perfect robots' communication during exploration, which is…
Subterranean environments with lots of obstacles, including narrow passages, large voids, rock falls and absence of illumination were always challenging for control, navigation, and perception of mobile robots. The limited availability and…
Robot dogs are receiving increasing attention in various fields of research. However, the number of studies investigating their potential usability on construction sites is scarce. The construction industry implies several human…
The graph exploration problem requires a group of mobile robots, initially placed arbitrarily on the nodes of a graph, to work collaboratively to explore the graph such that each node is eventually visited by at least one robot. One…
This study investigates the problem of areostationary orbits around Mars in the three-dimensional space. Areostationary orbits are expected to be used to establish a future telecommunication network for the exploration of Mars. However, no…
Pipelines, vital for fluid transport, pose an important yet challenging inspection task, particularly in small, flexible biological systems, that robots have yet to master. In this study, we explored the development of an innovative robot…
Exploring lunar lava tubes requires robots to traverse without human intervention. Because pre-trained policies cannot fully cover all possible terrain conditions, our goal is to enable adaptive policy switching, where the robot selects an…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…