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While it is expected to build robotic limbs with multiple degrees of freedom (DoF) inspired by nature, a single DoF design remains fundamental, providing benefits that include, but are not limited to, simplicity, robustness,…
Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…
An impedance-based control scheme is introduced for cooperative manipulators grasping a rigid load. The position and orientation of the load are to be maintained close to a desired trajectory, trading off tracking accuracy by low energy…
We propose and develop an electrical and mechanical system model of a single-axis linear-motion kinetic energy harvester for impulsive excitation that allows its generated load power to be numerically optimised as a function of design…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
Highly articulated organisms serve as blueprints for incredibly dexterous mechanisms, but building similarly capable robotic counterparts has been hindered by the difficulties of developing electromechanical actuators with both the high…
Resourceful operation and design of robots is key for sustainable industrial automation. This will be enabled by lightweight design along with time and energy optimal control of robotic manipulators. Design and control of such systems is…
Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…
Practical bipedal robot locomotion needs to be both energy efficient and robust to variability and uncertainty. In this paper, we build upon recent works in trajectory optimization for robot locomotion with two primary goals. First, we wish…
Flexible robotics are capable of achieving various functionalities by shape morphing, benefiting from their compliant bodies and reconfigurable structures. Here we construct and study a class of origami springs generalized from the known…
In comparison with existing approaches, which struggle with scalability, communication dependency, and robustness against dynamic failures, cooperative aerial transportation via robot swarms holds transformative potential for logistics and…
Robotic legs have bimodal operations: swing phases when the leg needs to move quickly in the air (high-speed, low-force) and stance phases when the leg bears the weight of the system (low-speed, high-force). Sizing a traditional…
This study explores the dynamics of asymmetrical bounding gaits in quadrupedal robots, focusing on the integration of torso pitching and hip motion to enhance speed and stability. Traditional control strategies often enforce a fixed…
The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority of design decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way of facing this task is computational design methods where design parameters…
Replicating the remarkable athleticism seen in animals has long been a challenge in robotics control. Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant progress in dynamic legged locomotion control, the substantial…
Reconfigurable robots refer to a category of robots that their components (individual joints and links) can be assembled in multiple configurations and geometries. Most of existing latching mechanisms are based on physical tools such as…
This note illustrates the possibility in simple loaded string models of trapping most of the system energy in a single degree of freedom for very long times, demonstrating in particular that the robustness of the trapping is enhanced by…
In the present article we determine the exact shape of an ideal spring suspended at both ends. Historically, this goes under the name of Elastica problem. The total energy of the suspended spring is a functional depending on two independent…
Series elastic robots are best able to follow trajectories which obey the limitations of their actuators, since they cannot instantly change their joint forces. In fact, the performance of series elastic actuators can surpass that of ideal…