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Artificial muscles play a crucial role in musculoskeletal robotics and prosthetics to approximate the force-generating functionality of biological muscle. However, current artificial muscle systems are typically limited to either…
Modular robotics holds immense potential for space exploration, where reliability, repairability, and reusability are critical for cost-effective missions. Coordination between heterogeneous units is paramount for precision tasks -- whether…
Wearable exoskeletons can augment human strength and reduce muscle fatigue during specific tasks. However, developing personalized and task-generalizable assistance algorithms remains a critical challenge. To address this, a meta-imitation…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
The application of biomechanic and motor control models in the control of bidedal robots (humanoids, and exoskeletons) has revealed limitations of our understanding of human locomotion. A recently proposed model uses the potential energy…
Responding mechanically to environmental requests, muscles show a surprisingly large variety of functions. The studies of in vivo cycling muscles qualified skeletal muscles into four principal locomotor patterns: motor, brake, strut, and…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
Recent progress in human-robot collaboration makes fast and fluid interactions possible, even when human observations are partial and occluded. Methods like Interaction Probabilistic Movement Primitives (ProMP) model human trajectories…
Quadrupeds transition spontaneously to various gait patterns (e.g., walk, trot, pace, gallop) in response to the locomotion speed. The generation of these gait patterns has been the subject of debate for a long time. We propose a coupled…
The age and stroke-associated decline in musculoskeletal strength degrades the ability to perform daily human tasks using the upper extremities. Although there are a few examples of exoskeletons, they need manual operations due to the…
We introduce Berkeley Humanoid, a reliable and low-cost mid-scale humanoid research platform for learning-based control. Our lightweight, in-house-built robot is designed specifically for learning algorithms with low simulation complexity,…
Biped robots usually adopt feet with a rigid structure that simplifies walking on flat grounds and yet hinders ground adaptation in unstructured environments, thus jeopardizing stability. We recently explored in the SoftFoot the idea of…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
Legged robots promise higher versatility and the ability to traverse much more difficult terrains than their wheeled counterparts. Even though the use of legged robots have increased drastically in the last few years, they are still not…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Configurable robots are made up of robotic modules that can be assembled or can configure themselves into multiple robot configurations. In this research plan, a method for upper-body rehabilitation will be discussed in the form of a…
Pushing is a motion primitive useful to handle objects that are too large, too heavy, or too cluttered to be grasped. It is at the core of much of robotic manipulation, in particular when physical interaction is involved. It seems…
We investigate the dynamics of a magnetoelastic robot with a dipolar magnetic head and a slender elastic body as it performs undulatory strokes and burrows through water-saturated granular beds. The robot is actuated by an oscillating…
Human motion prediction is an essential component for enabling closer human-robot collaboration. The task of accurately predicting human motion is non-trivial. It is compounded by the variability of human motion, both at a skeletal level…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…