Related papers: PCBot: a Minimalist Robot Designed for Swarm Appli…
Aerial robots the size of a honeybee (~100 mg) have advantages over larger robots because of their small size, low mass and low materials cost. Previous iterations have demonstrated controlled flight but were difficult to fabricate because…
Shake tables serve as a critical tool for simulating earthquake events and testing the response of structures to seismic forces. However, existing shake tables are either expensive or proprietary. This paper presents the design and…
We introduce Swarm Fabrication, a novel concept of creating on-demand, scalable, and reconfigurable fabrication machines made of swarm robots. We present ways to construct an element of fabrication machines, such as motors, elevator, table,…
This article presents the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of SWheg, a novel modular wheel-leg transformable robot family with minimalist actuator realization. SWheg takes advantage of both wheeled and legged locomotion by…
The Mini Wheelbot is a balancing, reaction wheel unicycle robot designed as a testbed for learning-based control. It is an unstable system with highly nonlinear yaw dynamics, non-holonomic driving, and discrete contact switches in a small,…
The miniaturization of electronics, sensors and actuators has enabled the growing use of CubeSats and sub-20 kg spacecraft. Their reduced mass and volume has the potential to translate into significant reductions in required propellant and…
Educational robots allow experimenting with a variety of principles from mechanics, electronics, and informatics. Here we propose ClipBot, a low-cost, do-it-yourself, robot whose skeleton is made of two paper clips. An Arduino nano…
This paper introduces a cube-based reconfigurable robot that utilizes an electromagnet-based actuation framework to reconfigure in three dimensions via pivoting. While a variety of actuation mechanisms for self-reconfigurable robots have…
Magnetic rolling microrobots enable gentle manipulation in confined microfluidic environments, yet autonomy for contact-rich behaviors such as cell pushing and multi-target assembly remains difficult to develop and evaluate reproducibly. We…
The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments.…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
To improve the accessibility of robotics, we propose a design and fabrication strategy to build low-cost electromechanical systems for robotic devices. Our method, based on origami-inspired cut-and-fold and E-textiles techniques, aims at…
Soft actuators have drawn significant attention from researchers with an inherently compliant design to address the safety issues in physical human-robot interactions. However, they are also vulnerable and pose new challenges in the design,…
While a number of excellent review articles on military robots have appeared in existing literature, this paper focuses on a distinct sub-space of related problems: small military robots organized into moderately sized squads, operating in…
Given a reconfigurable system X, such as a robot moving on a grid or a set of particles traversing a graph without colliding, the possible positions of X naturally form a cubical complex S(X). When S(X) is a CAT(0) space, we can explicitly…
Applications of large-scale mobile multi-robot systems can be beneficial over monolithic robots because of higher potential for robustness and scalability. Developing controllers for multi-robot systems is challenging because the multitude…
Our goal in this work is to expand the theory and practice of robot locomotion by addressing critical challenges associated with the robotic biomimicry of bat aerial locomotion. Bats wings exhibit fast wing articulation and can mobilize as…
Despite their growing popularity, swarms of robots remain limited by the operating time of each individual. We present algorithms which allow a human to sculpt a swarm of robots into a shape that persists in space perpetually, independent…
Robots are ubiquitous in small-to-large-scale manufacturers. While collaborative robots (cobots) have significant potential in these settings due to their flexibility and ease of use, proper integration is critical to realize their full…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…