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The human shoulder, with its glenohumeral joint, tendons, ligaments, and muscles, allows for the execution of complex tasks with precision and efficiency. However, current robotic shoulder designs lack the compliance and compactness…
Soft robotics is attractive for wearable applications that require conformal interactions with the human body. Soft wearable robotic garments hold promise for supplying dynamic compression or massage therapies, such as are applied for…
In this paper, we present a hardware-control co-design approach that enables efficient and versatile roller skating on quadrupedal robots equipped with passive wheels. Passive-wheel skating reduces leg inertia and improves energy…
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…
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
Designing multi-agent robotic systems requires reasoning across tightly coupled decisions spanning heterogeneous domains, including robot design, fleet composition, and planning. Much effort has been devoted to isolated improvements in…
To reproduce natural standing-up motion, recent studies have emphasized the importance of coordination between the assisting robot and the human. However, many non-wearable assistive devices have struggled to replicate natural motion…
For lower limb amputees, an active ankle joint prosthesis can provide basic mobility functions. This study focuses on an ankle joint prosthesis system based on the principle of electric-hydraulic actuation. By analyzing the characteristics…
This paper deals with a new planar parallel mechanism with variable actuation and its kinetostatic performance. A drawback of parallel mechanisms is the non homogeneity of kinetostatic performance within their workspace. The common approach…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
Electrostatic actuators provide a promising approach to creating soft robotic sheets, due to their flexible form factor, modular integration, and fast response speed. However, their control requires kilo-Volt signals and understanding of…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
In this paper, we introduce a novel conceptual model for a robot's behavioral adaptation in its long-term interaction with humans, integrating dynamic robot role adaptation with principles of flow experience from psychology. This…
High-performance actuators are crucial to enable mechanical versatility of lower-limb wearable robots, which are required to be lightweight, highly backdrivable, and with high bandwidth. State-of-the-art actuators, e.g., series elastic…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…
We propose a parallel massage robot with compliant joints based on the series elastic actuator (SEA), offering a unified force-position control approach. First, the kinematic and static force models are established for obtaining the…
We present a new framework for prioritized multi-task motion-force control of fully-actuated robots. This work is established on a careful review and comparison of the state of the art. Some control frameworks are not optimal, that is they…
In robotics, structural design and behavior optimization have long been considered separate processes, resulting in the development of systems with limited capabilities. Recently, co-design methods have gained popularity, where bi-level…
Selecting robot design parameters can be challenging since these parameters are often coupled with the performance of the controller and, therefore, the resulting capabilities of the robot. This leads to a time-consuming and often expensive…
Wearable devices like exoskeletons are designed to reduce excessive loads on specific joints of the body. Specifically, single- or two-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) upper-body industrial exoskeletons typically focus on compensating for the…