Related papers: Fluidic FlowBots: Intelligence embodied in the cha…
Research on untethered micro-swimming robots is growing fast owing to their potential impact on minimally invasive medical procedures. Candidate propulsion mechanisms of robots are based on flagellar mechanisms of microorganisms such as…
We review recent advances in the design, synthesis, and modeling of active fluids. Active fluids have been at the center of many technological innovations and theoretical advances over the past two decades. Research on this new class of…
Smart active particles can acquire some limited knowledge of the fluid environment from simple mechanical cues and exert a control on their preferred steering direction. Their goal is to learn the best way to navigate by exploiting the…
Optical flow estimation is a critical task for tiny mobile robotics to enable safe and accurate navigation, obstacle avoidance, and other functionalities. However, optical flow estimation on tiny robots is challenging due to limited onboard…
Micro-organisms propel themselves in viscous environments by the periodic, nonreciprocal beating of slender appendages known as flagella. Active materials have been widely exploited to mimic this form of locomotion. However, the realization…
Wearable and legged robot designers face multiple challenges when choosing actuation. Traditional fully actuated designs using electric motors are multifunctional but oversized and inefficient for bearing conservative loads and for being…
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides high-fidelity simulations of fluid flows but remains computationally expensive for many-query applications. In recent years deep learning (DL) has been used to construct data-driven fluid-dynamic…
Soft robotics is advancing the use of flexible materials for adaptable robotic systems. Membrane-actuated soft robots address the limitations of traditional soft robots by using pressurized, extensible membranes to achieve stable, large…
In recent years, a variety of powerful LLM-based agentic systems have been applied to automate complex tasks through task orchestration. However, existing orchestration methods still face key challenges, including strategy collapse under…
Humanoid robots could benefit from using their upper bodies for support contacts, enhancing their workspace, stability, and ability to perform contact-rich and pushing tasks. In this paper, we propose a unified approach that combines an…
The compliant structure of soft robotic systems enables a variety of novel capabilities in comparison to traditional rigid-bodied robots. A subclass of soft fluid-driven actuators known as fiber reinforced elastomeric enclosures (FREEs) is…
Embodied systems experience the world as 'a symphony of flows': a combination of many continuous streams of sensory input coupled to self-motion, interwoven with the dynamics of external objects. These streams obey smooth,…
Tactile sensing plays a fundamental role in enabling robots to navigate dynamic and unstructured environments, particularly in applications such as delicate object manipulation, surface exploration, and human-robot interaction. In this…
Dense and versatile image representations underpin the success of virtually all computer vision applications. However, state-of-the-art networks, such as transformers, produce low-resolution feature grids, which are suboptimal for dense…
High-performance closed-loop control of truly soft continuum manipulators has remained elusive. Experimental demonstrations have largely relied on sufficiently stiff, piecewise architectures in which each actuated segment behaves as a…
Bio-inspired underwater vehicles could yield improved efficiency, maneuverability, and environmental compatibility over conventional propeller-driven underwater vehicles. However, to realize the swimming performance of biology, there is a…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…
The concept of aerial-aquatic robots has emerged as an innovative solution that can operate both in the air and underwater. Previous research on the design of such robots has been mainly focused on mature technologies such as fixed-wing and…
In Nature, liquids often circulate in channels textured with leaflets, cilia or porous walls that deform with the flow. These soft structures are optimized to passively control flows and inspire the design of novel microfluidic and soft…
Soft machines display shape adaptation to external circumstances due to their intrinsic compliance. To achieve increasingly more responsive behaviors upon interactions without relying on centralized computation, embodying memory directly in…