Related papers: Characterising the take-off dynamics and energy ef…

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…

Jumping is essential for legged robots to traverse through difficult terrains. In this work, we propose a hierarchical framework that combines optimal control and reinforcement learning to learn continuous jumping motions for quadrupedal…

We generalize the robotics equation describing the dynamics of open kinematic chains by including the effect of time-dependent change of inertial parameters as well as the effects of causative mass-density redistribution, triggered by…

Soft robots are made of compliant materials that perform their tasks by deriving motion from elastic deformations. They are used in various applications, e.g., for handling fragile objects, navigating sensitive/complex environments, etc.,…

The performance of a molecular motor, characterized by its power output and energy efficiency, is investigated in the motor design space spanned by the stepping rate function and the motor-track interaction potential. Analytic results and…

Human-robot co-carrying tasks reveal their potential in both industrial and everyday applications by leveraging the strengths of both parties. Effective control of robots in these tasks requires managing the energy level in the closed-loop…

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…

This paper considers the problem of safely coordinating a team of sensor-equipped robots to reduce uncertainty about a dynamical process, where the objective trades off information gain and energy cost. Optimizing this trade-off is…

With increasing numbers of mobile robots arriving in real-world applications, more robots coexist in the same space, interact, and possibly collaborate. Methods to provide such systems with system size scalability are known, for example,…

In this work, we present an algorithm for robot replacement to increase the operational time of a multi-robot payload transport system. Our system comprises a group of nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots traversing on a known trajectory. We…

Modern applications of robotics typically involve a robot control system with an inner PI (proportional-integral) or PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control loop and an outer user-specified control loop. The existing outer loop…

The joint optimization of physical parameters and controllers in robotic systems is challenging. This is due to the difficulties of predicting the effect that changes in physical parameters have on final performances. At the same time,…

Autonomous unpowered flight is a challenge for control and guidance systems: all the energy the aircraft might use during flight has to be harvested directly from the atmosphere. We investigate the design of an algorithm that optimizes the…

We analyze, from the thermodynamical point of view, mechanical systems in which there is production of mechanical energy due to an internal source of energy, and compare that analysis with the similar one for the "symmetric" motion which…

In this paper, we address energy management for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings, and present a novel combined optimization and control approach. We first formulate a thermal dynamics and an associated…

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…

Designing aerial robots for specialized tasks, from perching to payload delivery, requires tailoring their aerodynamic shape to specific mission requirements. For tasks involving wide flight envelopes, the usual sequential process of first…

Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…

This paper deals with random sensors initially randomly deployed on the line according to general random process and on the plane according to two independent general random processes. The mobile robot with carrying capacity $k$ placed at…

This paper presents an optimal motion planning framework to generate versatile energy-optimal quadrupedal jumping motions automatically (e.g., flips, spin). The jumping motions via the centroidal dynamics are formulated as a 12-dimensional…