Related papers: Rollbot: a Spherical Robot Driven by a Single Actu…
The ability to enter in contact with and manipulate physical objects with a flying robot enables many novel applications, such as contact inspection, painting, drilling, and sample collection. Generally, these aerial robots need more…
Drifting is an advanced driving technique where the wheeled robot's tire-ground interaction breaks the common non-holonomic pure rolling constraint. This allows high-maneuverability tasks like quick cornering, and steady-state drifting…
Consider the problem of planning collision-free motion of $n$ objects in the plane movable through contact with a robot that can autonomously translate in the plane and that can move a maximum of $m \leq n$ objects simultaneously. This…
The Modboat is an autonomous surface robot that turns the oscillation of a single motor into a controlled paddling motion through passive flippers. Inertial control methods developed in prior work can successfully drive the Modboat along…
Combining off-the-shelf components with 3D-printing, the Wheelbot is a symmetric reaction wheel unicycle that can jump onto its wheels from any initial position. With non-holonomic and under-actuated dynamics, as well as two coupled…
We present the dynamic model and control of DoubleBee, a novel hybrid aerial-ground vehicle consisting of two propellers mounted on tilting servo motors and two motor-driven wheels. DoubleBee exploits the high energy efficiency of a…
In this paper, I present vectorable thrust control for different locomotion modes by a novel quadruped robot, SPIDAR, equipped with vectoring rotor in each link. First, the robot's unique mechanical design, the dynamics model, and the basic…
We present a scheme for producing tunable active dynamics in a self-propelled robotic device. The robot moves using the differential drive mechanism where two wheels can vary their instantaneous velocities independently. These velocities…
The Roller-Quadrotor is a novel quadrotor that combines the maneuverability of aerial drones with the endurance of ground vehicles. This work focuses on the design, modeling, and experimental validation of the Roller-Quadrotor. Flight…
Soft robots - due to their intrinsic flexibility of the body - can adaptively navigate unstructured environments. One of the most popular locomotion gaits that has been implemented in soft robots is undulation. The undulation motion in soft…
Collaborative transport of objects via pushing by multiple robots has many applications, ranging from construction and warehouse environments to post disaster debris clean-up. Achieving collaborative transport over surfaces with different…
We propose a scalable cooperative control approach which coordinates a group of rigidly connected autonomous surface vessels to track desired trajectories in a planar water environment as a single floating modular structure. Our approach…
Humanoids are versatile robotic platforms owing to their limbs with multiple degrees of freedom. Although humanoids can walk like humans, they are relatively slow, and cannot run over large barriers. To address these limitations, we aim to…
Complexity, cost, and power requirements for the actuation of individual robots can play a large factor in limiting the size of robotic swarms. Here we present PCBot, a minimalist robot that can precisely move on an orbital shake table…
A robotic platform for mobile manipulation needs to satisfy two contradicting requirements for many real-world applications: A compact base is required to navigate through cluttered indoor environments, while the support needs to be large…
Despite a slow neuromuscular system, humans easily outperform modern robot technology, especially in physical contact tasks. How is this possible? Biological evidence indicates that motor control of biological systems is achieved by a…
Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks,…
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,…
Soft robotics is an attractive and rapidly emerging field, in which actuation is coupled with the elastic response of the robot's structure to achieve complex deformation patterns. A crucial challenge is the need for multiple control…
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.…