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Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
The mechanical environment of a substrate plays a key role in influencing the behavior of adherent biological cells. Traditional tunable substrates have limitations as their mechanical properties cannot be dynamically altered in-situ during…
Robotic arms built from stiffness-adjustable, continuously bending segments serially connected with revolute joints have the ability to change their mechanical architecture and workspace, thus allowing high flexibility and adaptation to…
Recently, a class of mechanical lattices with reconfigurable, zero-stiffness structures has been proposed, called Totimorphic lattices. In this work, we introduce a computational framework that enables continuous reprogramming of a…
Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control,…
Architected materials can achieve enhanced properties compared to their plain counterparts. Specific architecting serves as a powerful design lever to achieve targeted behavior without changing the base material. Thus, the connection…
In aerospace engineering, there is a growing demand for lightweight design through topology optimization. This paper presents a novel design optimization method for stiffened air rudders, commonly used for aircraft attitude control, based…
Inflated continuum robots are promising for a variety of navigation tasks, but controlling their motion with a small number of actuators is challenging. These inflated beam robots tend to buckle under compressive loads, producing extremely…
Piezoelectric transducers applied on or integrated in structures, combined with appropriate circuits have been extensively investigated as a smart approach to the mitigation of resonant vibrations with high relative amplitudes. \cmt{A…
Kinesthetic garments provide physical feedback on body posture and motion through tailored distributions of reinforced material. Their ability to selectively stiffen a garment's response to specific motions makes them appealing for…
In the automated co-design of soft robots, precisely adapting the material stiffness field to task environments is crucial for unlocking their full physical potential. However, mainstream platforms (e.g., EvoGym) strictly discretize the…
This paper presents a novel, modular, cable-driven soft robotic arm featuring multi-segment reconfigurability. The proposed architecture enables a stackable system with independent segment control, allowing scalable adaptation to diverse…
Continuum robots have gained widespread popularity due to their inherent compliance and flexibility, particularly their adjustable levels of stiffness for various application scenarios. Despite efforts to dynamic modeling and control…
Knitting turns yarn, a 1D material, into a 2D fabric that is flexible, durable [1], and can be patterned to adopt a wide range of 3D geometries [2]. Like other mechanical metamaterials [3], the elasticity of knitted fabrics is an emergent…
We present a novel method for optimizing the posture of kinematically redundant torque-controlled robots to improve robustness during impacts. A rigid impact model is used as the basis for a configuration-dependent metric that quantifies…
This study introduces an innovative design for a Variable Stiffness 3 Degrees of Freedom actuated wrist capable of actively and continuously adjusting its overall stiffness by modulating the active length of non-linear elastic elements.…
Organisms in nature, such as Cephalopods and Pachyderms, exploit stiffness modulation to achieve amazing dexterity in the control of their appendages. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of layer jamming, which is a popular stiffness…
Reconfigurable robots that can change their physical configuration post-fabrication have demonstrate their potential in adapting to different environments or tasks. However, it is challenging to determine how to optimally adjust…
Architected materials achieve unique mechanical properties through precisely engineered microstructures that minimize material usage. However, a key challenge of low-density materials is balancing high stiffness with stable deformability up…
Pattern-forming metamaterials feature microstructures specifically designed to change the material's macroscopic properties due to internal instabilities. These can be triggered either by mechanical deformation or, in the case of active…