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A quadruped robot faces balancing challenges on a six-degrees-of-freedom moving platform, like subways, buses, airplanes, and yachts, due to independent platform motions and resultant diverse inertia forces on the robot. To alleviate these…
Flapping-wing robots offer significant versatility; however, achieving efficient multi-modal locomotion remains challenging. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimentation of a novel tailless flapping-wing robot with three…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
In this paper, we study a wheeled robot with a prismatic extension joint. This allows the robot to build up momentum to perform jumps over obstacles and to swing up to the upright position after the loss of balance. We propose a template…
To traverse complex scenarios reliably a legged robot needs to move its base aided by the ground reaction forces, which can only be generated by the legs that are momentarily in contact with the ground. A proper selection of footholds is…
Adapting upper-limb impedance (i.e., stiffness, damping, inertia) is essential for humans interacting with dynamic environments for executing grasping or manipulation tasks. On the other hand, control methods designed for state-of-the-art…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
Limbless organisms such as snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granular media (such as sand dunes) that induce failure in…
This study presents the design of a six-wheeled outdoor autonomous mobile robot. The main design goal of our robot is to increase its adaptability and flexibility when moving outdoors. This six-wheeled robot platform was equipped with some…
Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a…
The capability of effectively moving on complex terrains such as sand and gravel can empower our robots to robustly operate in outdoor environments, and assist with critical tasks such as environment monitoring, search-and-rescue, and…
Search and rescue (SAR) robots are required to quickly traverse terrain and perform high-force rescue tasks, necessitating both terrain adaptability and controlled high-force output. Few platforms exist today for SAR, and fewer still have…
Solving mobile manipulation tasks in inaccessible and dangerous environments is an important application of robots to support humans. Example domains are construction and maintenance of manned and unmanned stations on the moon and other…
Generation of robust trajectories for legged robots remains a challenging task due to the underlying nonlinear, hybrid and intrinsically unstable dynamics which needs to be stabilized through limited contact forces. Furthermore,…
Inspired by the octopus and other animals living in water, soft robots should naturally lend themselves to underwater operations, as supported by encouraging validations in deep water scenarios. This work deals with equipping soft arms with…
Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
Locomotion on dynamic rigid surface (i.e., rigid surface accelerating in an inertial frame) presents complex challenges for controller design, which are essential for deploying humanoid robots in dynamic real-world environments such as…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…
Model-free reinforcement learning is a promising approach for autonomously solving challenging robotics control problems, but faces exploration difficulty without information of the robot's kinematics and dynamics morphology. The…