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We present a rolling and jumping underactuated monopedal robot designed to explore multimodal locomotion on low-gravity bodies. It uses only two reaction wheels to control its spatial orientation with two controllers: a balancing controller…
Soft robots require directional control to navigate complex terrains. However, achieving such control often requires multiple actuators, which increases mechanical complexity, complicates control systems, and raises energy consumption.…
The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…
Task-space Passivity-Based Control (PBC) for manipulation has numerous appealing properties, including robustness to modeling error and safety for human-robot interaction. Existing methods perform poorly in singular configurations, however,…
The Michigan Robotics MBot is a low-cost mobile robot platform that has been used to train over 1,400 students in autonomous navigation since 2014 at the University of Michigan and our collaborating colleges. The MBot platform was designed…
Swarm robots, which are inspired from the way insects behave collectively in order to achieve a common goal, have become a major part of research with applications involving search and rescue, area exploration, surveillance etc. In this…
Modular microrobotics can potentially address many information-intensive microtasks in medicine, manufacturing and the environment. However, surface area has limited the natural powering, communication, functional integration, and…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Human interaction introduces two main constraints: Safety and Comfort. Therefore service robot manipulator can't be controlled like industrial robotic manipulator where personnel is isolated from the robot's work envelope. In this paper, we…
Humanoid robotics is a promising field because the strong human preference to interact with anthropomorphic interfaces. Despite this, humanoid robots are far from reaching main stream adoption and the features available in such robots seem…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
Swarm robotic systems are currently being used to address many real-world problems. One interesting application of swarm robotics is the self-organized formation of structures and shapes. Some of the key challenges in the swarm robotic…
We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…
CubeSats are miniature satellites used to carry experimental payloads into orbit, where it is often critical to precisely control their attitude. One way to do this is through the use of magnetorquers, which can be integrated into PCBs.…
In both animals and robots, locomotion capabilities are determined by the physical structure of the system. The majority of legged animals and robots are bilaterally symmetric, which facilitates locomotion with consistent headings and…
Back injuries are the most prevalent work-related musculoskeletal disorders and represent a major cause of disability. Although innovations in wearable robots aim to alleviate this hazard, the majority of existing exoskeletons are obtrusive…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…
The ability to propel against flows, i.e., to perform positive rheotaxis, can provide exciting opportunities for applications in targeted therapeutics and non-invasive surgery. To date, no biocompatible technologies exist for navigating…
Robotic systems are routinely used in the logistics industry to enhance operational efficiency, but the design of robot workspaces remains a complex and manual task, which limits the system's flexibility to changing demands. This paper aims…
Evolutionary and swarm algorithms have found many applications in design problems since todays computing power enables these algorithms to find solutions to complicated design problems very fast. Newly proposed hybrid algorithm, bat…