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While soft robot manipulators offer compelling advantages over rigid counterparts, including inherent compliance, safe human-robot interaction, and the ability to conform to complex geometries, accurate forward modeling from low-dimensional…
Multisection continuum arms offer complementary characteristics to those of traditional rigid-bodied robots. Inspired by biological appendages, such as elephant trunks and octopus arms, these robots trade rigidity for compliance, accuracy…
Neural simulators promise efficient surrogates for physics simulation, but scaling them is bottlenecked by the prohibitive cost of generating high-fidelity training data. Pre-training on abundant off-the-shelf geometries offers a natural…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
This paper presents the Language Aided Subset Sampling Based Motion Planner (LASMP), a system that helps mobile robots plan their movements by using natural language instructions. LASMP uses a modified version of the Rapidly Exploring…
Robots still struggle to dynamically traverse complex 3-D terrain with many large obstacles, an ability required for many critical applications. Body-obstacle interaction is often inevitable and induces perturbation and uncertainty in…
Living systems can use a single periphery to perform a variety of tasks and adapt to a dynamic environment. This multifunctionality is achieved through the use of neural circuitry that adaptively controls the reconfigurable musculature.…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…
This research focuses on developing reinforcement learning approaches for the locomotion generation of small-size quadruped robots. The rat robot NeRmo is employed as the experimental platform. Due to the constrained volume, small-size…
Body posture influences human and robots performance in manipulation tasks, as appropriate poses facilitate motion or force exertion along different axes. In robotics, manipulability ellipsoids arise as a powerful descriptor to analyze,…
Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…
Safe and real-time navigation is fundamental for humanoid robot applications. However, existing bipedal robot navigation frameworks often struggle to balance computational efficiency with the precision required for stable locomotion. We…
Despite recent advances in learning-based controllers for legged robots, deployments in human-centric environments remain limited by safety concerns. Most of these approaches use position-based control, where policies output target joint…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…
While motion planning of locomotion for legged robots has shown great success, motion planning for legged robots with dexterous multi-finger grasping is not mature yet. We present an efficient motion planning framework for simultaneously…
This paper presents a learning-based tracking control framework for cooperative transport of a rigid payload by multiple aerial manipulators under rigid grasp constraints. A unified geometric model is developed, yielding a coupled…
Robotic grasping is a cornerstone capability of embodied systems. Many methods directly output grasps from partial information without modeling the geometry of the scene, leading to suboptimal motion and even collisions. To address these…
This paper presents the first steps toward a soft dolphin robot using a bio-inspired approach to mimic dolphin flexibility. The current dolphin robot uses a minimalist approach, with only two actuated cable-driven degrees of freedom…