Related papers: SpaceHopper: A Small-Scale Legged Robot for Explor…
Legged rovers provide enhanced mobility compared to wheeled platforms, enabling navigation on steep and irregular planetary terrains. However, traditional legged locomotion might be energetically inefficient and potentially dangerous to the…
This paper presents SCALER, a versatile free-climbing multi-limbed robot that is designed to achieve tightly coupled simultaneous locomotion and dexterous grasping. While existing quadrupedal-limbed robots have demonstrated impressive…
Exploration of small bodies, namely comets and asteroids remain a challenging endeavor due to their low gravity. The risk is so high that missions such as Hayabusa II and OSIRIS-REx will be performing touch and go missions to obtain…
This paper introduces a novel, small form-factor, aerial vehicle research platform for agile object detection, classification, tracking, and interaction tasks. General-purpose hardware components were designed to augment a given aerial…
Multimodal locomotion is crucial for an animal's adaptability in unstructured wild environments. Similarly, in the human gastrointestinal tract, characterized by viscoelastic mucus, complex rugae, and narrow sphincters like the cardia,…
This paper introduces FlipWalker, a novel underactuated robot locomotion system inspired by Jacob's Ladder illusion toy, designed to traverse challenging terrains where wheeled robots often struggle. Like the Jacob's Ladder toy, FlipWalker…
Celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars are mainly covered by loose, granular soil, a notoriously challenging terrain to traverse with (wheeled) robotic systems. Here, we present experimental work on traversing steep, granular slopes…
Despite numerous successful missions to small celestial bodies, the gravity field of such targets has been poorly characterized so far. Gravity estimates can be used to infer the internal structure and composition of small bodies and, as…
In this letter, we present a novel bi-modal bi-copter robot called Skater, which is adaptable to air and various ground surfaces. Skater consists of a bi-copter moving along its longitudinal direction with two passive wheels on both sides.…
Exploration of extreme environments, including caves, canyons and cliffs on low-gravity surfaces such as the Moon, Mars and asteroids can provide insight into the geological history of the solar system, origins of water, life and prospect…
Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…
In this paper, we present a novel rolling, jumping robot. The robot consists of a driven pendulum mounted to a wheel in a compact, lightweight, 3D printed design. We show that by driving the pendulum to shift the robot's weight…
Aerial robots have garnered significant attention due to their potential applications in various industries, such as inspection, search and rescue, and drone delivery. Successful missions often depend on the ability of these robots to grasp…
This study describes the development and validation of a novel microgravity experimental platform that is mainly applied to small robots such as modular self-reconfigurable robots. This platform mainly consists of an air supply system, a…
This paper introduces SCALER, a quadrupedal robot that demonstrates climbing on bouldering walls, overhangs, ceilings and trotting on the ground. SCALER is one of the first high-degrees of freedom four-limbed robots that can free-climb…
We introduce an instrument for a wide spectrum of experiments on gravities other than our planet's. It is based on a large Atwood machine where one of the loads is a bucket equipped with a single board computer and different sensors. The…
Robots have been critical instruments to space exploration by providing access to environments beyond human limitations. Jumping robot concepts are attractive solutions to negotiate complex terrain. However, among the engineering challenges…
Autonomous locomotion for mobile ground robots in unstructured environments such as waypoint navigation or flipper control requires a sufficiently accurate prediction of the robot-terrain interaction. Heuristics like occupancy grids or…
We present a novel controller design on a robotic locomotor that combines an aerial vehicle with a spring-loaded leg. The main motivation is to enable the terrestrial locomotion capability on aerial vehicles so that they can carry heavy…
Among small-scale mobile robots, multi-modal locomotion can help compensate for limited actuator capabilities. However, supporting multiple locomotion modes or gaits in small terrestrial robots typically requires complex designs with low…