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Reducing the forces necessary to construct projects like landing pads and blast walls is possibly one of the major drivers in reducing the costs of establishing lunar settlements. The interlock drive system generates traction by penetrating…
Robots benefit from being able to classify objects they interact with or manipulate based on their material properties. This capability ensures fine manipulation of complex objects through proper grasp pose and force selection. Prior work…
Since the Apollo program or earlier it has been widely believed that the lunar regolith was compacted through vibrations including nearby impact events, thermal stress release in the regolith, deep moon quakes, and shallow moon quakes.…
Soft robots have been increasingly utilized as sophisticated tools in physical rehabilitation, particularly for assisting patients with neuromotor impairments. However, many soft robotics for rehabilitation applications are characterized by…
This study proposes a novel robotic gripper with variable grasping configurations for grasping various objects. The fingers of the developed gripper incorporate multiple different surfaces. The gripper possesses the function of altering the…
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…
The integration of vision-based frameworks to achieve lunar robot applications faces numerous challenges such as terrain configuration or extreme lighting conditions. This paper presents a generic task pipeline using object detection,…
Autonomous locomotion for mobile ground robots in unstructured environments such as waypoint navigation or flipper control requires a sufficiently accurate prediction of the robot-terrain interaction. Heuristics like occupancy grids or…
Ants are highly capable of grasping objects in clutter, and we have recently observed that this involves substantial use of their forelegs. The forelegs, more specifically the tarsi, have high friction microstructures (setal pads), are…
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
Grasp planning and most specifically the grasp space exploration is still an open issue in robotics. This article presents a data-driven oriented methodology to model the grasp space of a multi-fingered adaptive gripper for known objects.…
A simple gripper can solve more complex manipulation tasks if it can utilize the external environment such as pushing the object against the table or a vertical wall, known as "Extrinsic Dexterity." Previous work in extrinsic dexterity…
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…
We investigate the influence of particle stiffness on the grasping performance of granular grippers, a class of soft robotic effectors that utilize granular jamming for object manipulation. Through experimental analyses and X-ray imaging,…
Muddy terrains present significant challenges for terrestrial robots, as subtle changes in composition and water content can lead to large variations in substrate strength and force responses, causing the robot to slip or get stuck. This…
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…
Sheared granular layers undergoing stick slip behavior are broadly employed to study the physics and dynamics of earthquakes. Here, a two dimensional implementation of the combined finite discrete element method (FDEM), which merges the…
Motion planning for a multi-limbed climbing robot must consider the robot's posture, joint torques, and how it uses contact forces to interact with its environment. This paper focuses on motion planning for a robot that uses nontraditional…
Robotic grasping and manipulation in underwater environments present unique challenges for robotic hands traditionally used on land. These challenges stem from dynamic water conditions, a wide range of object properties from soft to stiff,…
Many robots move through the world by composing locomotion primitives like steps and turns. To do so well, robots need not have primitives that make intuitive sense to humans. This becomes of paramount importance when robots are damaged and…