Related papers: Power-Efficient Actuation for Insect-Scale Autonom…
Bio-inspired underwater vehicles could yield improved efficiency, maneuverability, and environmental compatibility over conventional propeller-driven underwater vehicles. However, to realize the swimming performance of biology, there is a…
Coordinating micro-robotic swarms in physiologically realistic, time-dependent fluid environments remains an unsolved challenge for biomedical and environmental applications. We present a hybrid Computational Fluid Dynamics -…
Fine-grained power monitoring of software activities becomes unavoidable to maximize the power usage efficiency of data centers. In particular, achieving an optimal scheduling of containers requires the deployment of software-defined…
Here we present the design of an insect-scale microrobot that generates lift by spinning its wings. This is in contrast to most other microrobot designs at this size scale which rely on flapping wings to produce lift. The robot has a wing…
We present the design of an insect-sized jumping microrobot measuring 17mm$\times$6mm$\times$14mm and weighing 75 milligrams. The microrobot consumes 6.4mW of power to jump up by 8mm in height. The tethered version of the robot can jump 6…
In the quest for electrically-driven soft actuators, the focus has shifted away from liquid-gas phase transition, commonly associated with reduced strain rates and actuation delays, in favour of electrostatic and other electrothermal…
This paper describes the control, and evaluation of a new human-scaled biped robot with liquid cooled viscoelastic actuators (VLCA). Based on the lessons learned from previous work from our team on VLCA [1], we present a new system design…
Miniaturised soft pneumatic actuators are crucial for robotic intervention within highly constrained anatomical pathways. This work presents the design and validation of a fibre-reinforced soft actuator at the centimetre scale for inte-…
When swimming at low Reynolds numbers, inertial effects are negligible and reciprocal movements cannot induce net motion. Instead, symmetry breaking is necessary to achieve net propulsion. Directed swimming can be supported by magnetic…
Water quality monitoring is essential for protecting aquatic ecosystems and detecting environmental pollution. This paper presents the design and experimental validation of a bio-inspired miniature submarine for low-cost water quality…
This paper introduces Q8bot, an open-source, miniature quadruped designed for robotics research and education. We present the robot's novel zero-wire design methodology, which leads to its superior form factor, robustness, replicability,…
Fin actuators can be used for for both thrust generation and vectoring. Therefore, fin-driven autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) can achieve high maneuverability with a smaller number of actuators, but their control is challenging. This…
Bio-inspired vehicles are currently leading the way in the quest to produce a vehicle capable of flight and underwater navigation. However, a fully functional vehicle has not yet been realized. We present the first fully functional vehicle…
The motion of biological micro-robots -- similar to that of swimming microorganisms such as bacteria or spermatozoa -- is governed by different physical rules than what we experience in our daily life. This is particularly due to the…
Lack of fast and strong actuators to drive microsystems is well recognized. Electrochemical actuators are considered attractive for many applications but they have long response time (minutes) due to slow gas termination. Here an…
Variable impedance actuators (VIAs) as tool devices for teleoperation could extend the range of tasks that humans can perform through a teleoperated robot by mimicking the change of upper limb stiffness that humans perform for different…
This paper presents SleepViT, a custom accelerator ASIC for real-time, low-power sleep stage classification in wearable devices. At the core of SleepViT is a lightweight vision transformer model specifically optimized for…
Due to limitations in available sensor technology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) lack an active sensing capability to measure turbulence, gusts, or other unsteady aerodynamic phenomena. Conventional in situ anemometry techniques fail to…
Matching the swimming efficiency and agility of fish has remained an elusive goal in underwater robotics. Such locomotion capabilities rely on complex vortex interactions between the robot's body and the surrounding fluid. However,…
Micro motors that could run in liquid environment is very important for a variety of practices such as serving as pipeline robot, soft machine, drug delivery, or microfluidics system etc. However, fabrication of such tiny motors is…