Related papers: Soft Gripping System for Space Exploration Legged …
Locomotion on granular slopes such as sand dunes remains a fundamental challenge for legged robots due to reduced shear strength and gravity-induced anisotropic yielding of granular media. Using a hexapedal robot on a tiltable granular bed,…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Multi-legged elongate robots hold promise for maneuvering through complex environments. Prior work has demonstrated that reliable locomotion can be achieved using open-loop body undulation and foot placement on rugose terrain. However,…
Rapid aerial grasping through robots can lead to many applications that utilize fast and dynamic picking and placing of objects. Rigid grippers traditionally used in aerial manipulators require high precision and specific object geometries…
Future planetary exploration missions will require reaching challenging regions such as craters and steep slopes. Such regions are ubiquitous and present science-rich targets potentially containing information regarding the planet's…
Soft and lightweight grippers have greatly enhanced the performance of robotic manipulators in handling complex objects with varying shape, texture, and stiffness. However, the combination of universal grasping with passive sensing…
Compared to traditional rigid robotics, soft robotics has attracted increasing attention due to its advantages as compliance, safety, and low cost. As an essential part of soft robotics, the soft robotic gripper also shows its superior…
In developing mobile robots for exploration on the planetary surface, it is crucial to evaluate the robot's performance, demonstrating the harsh environment in which the robot will actually be deployed. Repeatable experiments in a…
When performing manipulation-based activities such as picking objects, a mobile robot needs to position its base at a location that supports successful execution. To address this problem, prominent approaches typically rely on costly grasp…
Novel robotic grippers have captured increasing interests recently because of their abilities to adapt to varieties of circumstances and their powerful functionalities. Differing from traditional gripper with mechanical components-made…
Quadruped robots are currently a widespread platform for robotics research, thanks to powerful Reinforcement Learning controllers and the availability of cheap and robust commercial platforms. However, to broaden the adoption of the…
A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and…
Legged robots have demonstrated high efficiency and effectiveness in unstructured and dynamic environments. However, it is still challenging for legged robots to achieve rapid and efficient locomotion on deformable, yielding substrates,…
The potential of Martian lava tubes for resource extraction and habitat sheltering highlights the need for robots capable to undertake the grueling task of their exploration. Driven by this motivation, in this work we introduce a legged…
Legged robots can sense terrain through force interactions during locomotion, offering more reliable traversability estimates than remote sensing and serving as scouts for guiding wheeled rovers in challenging environments. However, even…
The exploration of the lunar poles and the collection of samples from the martian surface are characterized by shorter time windows demanding increased autonomy and speeds. Autonomous mobile robots must intrinsically cope with a wider range…
Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…
Recently, magnetorheological elastomers have become an interesting smart material with many new designs for robotics. A variety of applications have been built with magnetorheological elastomers, such as vibration absorbers, actuators, or…
This paper presents SCALER, a versatile free-climbing multi-limbed robot that is designed to achieve tightly coupled simultaneous locomotion and dexterous grasping. While existing quadrupedal-limbed robots have demonstrated impressive…
One of the trendsetting themes in soft robotics has been the goal of developing the ultimate universal soft robotic gripper. One that is capable of manipulating items of various shapes, sizes, thicknesses, textures, and weights. All the…