Related papers: A flexured-gimbal 3-axis force-torque sensor revea…
This letter considers control of a radially symmetric tripedal friction-driven robot. The robot features 3 servo motors mounted on a 3-D printed chassis 7 cm from the center of mass and separated 120 degrees. These motors drive limbs, which…
Fixed-wing vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft pose a unique control challenge that stems from complex aerodynamic interactions between wings and rotors. Thus, accurate estimation of external forces is indispensable for achieving…
Contact-rich manipulation depends on applying the correct grasp forces throughout the manipulation task, especially when handling fragile or deformable objects. Most existing imitation learning approaches often treat visuotactile feedback…
Commercial six-axis force-torque sensors suffer from being some combination of expensive, fragile, and hard-to-use. We propose a new fiducial-based design which addresses all three points. The sensor uses an inexpensive webcam and can be…
While compliant grippers have become increasingly commonplace in robot manipulation, finding the right stiffness and geometry for grasping the widest variety of objects remains a key challenge. Adjusting both stiffness and gripper geometry…
This work briefly covers our efforts to stabilize the flight dynamics of Northeastern's tailless bat-inspired micro aerial vehicle, Aerobat. Flapping robots are not new. A plethora of examples is mainly dominated by insect-style design…
Flying vertebrates exhibit sophisticated wingbeat kinematics. Their specialized forelimbs allow for the wing morphing motion to couple with the flapping motion during their level flight, Previous flyable bionic platforms have successfully…
The design of localization systems for small-scale flapping-wing aerial robots faces relevant challenges caused by the limited payload and onboard computational resources. This paper presents an ultra-wideband localization system…
Grasping using an aerial robot can have many applications ranging from infrastructure inspection and maintenance to precise agriculture. However, aerial grasping is a challenging problem since the robot has to maintain an accurate position…
Drones, like most airborne aerial vehicles, face inherent disadvantages in achieving agile flight due to their limited thrust capabilities. These physical constraints cannot be fully addressed through advancements in control algorithms…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer endurance and efficiency but lack low-speed agility due to highly coupled dynamics. We present an end-to-end sensing-to-control pipeline that combines bio-inspired hardware, physics-informed…
This paper proposes techniques to calibrate six-axis force-torque sensors that can be performed in situ, i.e., without removing the sensor from the hosting system. We assume that the force-torque sensor is attached to a rigid body equipped…
What if our clothes could capture our body motion accurately? This paper introduces Flexible Inertial Poser (FIP), a novel motion-capturing system using daily garments with two elbow-attached flex sensors and four Inertial Measurement Units…
Haptic devices have shown to be valuable in supplementing surgical training, especially when providing haptic feedback based on user performance metrics such as wrench applied by the user on the tool. However, current 6-axis force/torque…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn,…
Tilt-rotor aerial robots enable omnidirectional maneuvering through thrust vectoring, but introduce significant control challenges due to the strong coupling between joint and rotor dynamics. While model-based controllers can achieve high…
This MS thesis outlines my contributions to the closed loop control and system integration of two robotic platforms: 1) Aerobat, a flapping wing robot stabilized by air jets, and 2) Harpy, a bipedal robot equipped with dual thrusters. Both…
The family of multi-plane phase retrieval sensors, such as the curvature and nonlinear curvature wavefront sensors (WFS), contain tip/tilt information embedded in their signals. We have built a nonlinear curvature WFS to study different…
Realizing high-performance soft robotic grippers is challenging because of the inherent limitations of the soft actuators and artificial muscles that drive them, including low force output, small actuation range, and poor compactness.…