Related papers: Design optimization and robustness analysis of rig…
We designed and built a three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) flapping wing robot, Flapperoo, to study the aerodynamic benefits of wing folding and twisting. Forces and moments of this physical model are measured in wind tunnel tests over a…
The extraordinary aerial agility of hummingbirds and insects continues to inspire the design of flapping-wing drones. To replicate and analyze such flight, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations that couple flow solvers with rigid…
Collaborative robots must simultaneously be safe enough to operate in close proximity to human operators and powerful enough to assist users in industrial tasks such as lifting heavy equipment. The requirement for safety necessitates that…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
The traditional element-based topology optimization based on material penalization typically aims at a 0/1 design. Our numerical experiments reveal that the compliance of a smooth design is overestimated when material properties of boundary…
The paper presents a new stiffness modelling method for overconstrained parallel manipulators, which is applied to 3-d.o.f. translational mechanisms. It is based on a multidimensional lumped-parameter model that replaces the link…
This work describes the orchestration of a fleet of rotary-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for harvesting prioritized traffic from random distributions of heterogeneous users with Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) capabilities. In…
The dynamical response of an aircraft subject to gust perturbations is a key element in a preliminary design phase. In particular, the loads induced by gusts along the wing should not exceed some limit values and should even ideally be…
With recent advances in both responsive materials and fabrication techniques it is now possible to construct integrated functional structures, composed of both structural and active materials. We investigate the robust design of such…
This paper presents a haptic interface with modular linear actuators which can address limitations of conventional devices based on rotatory joints. The proposed haptic interface is composed of parallel linear actuators that provide high…
Soft robotic grasping has rapidly spread through the academic robotics community in recent years and pushed into industrial applications. At the same time, multimaterial 3D printing has become widely available, enabling the monolithic…
Metal additive manufacturing (AM) processes often fabricate a near-net shape that includes the as-designed part as well as the sacrificial support structures that need to be machined away by subtractive manufacturing (SM), for instance…
Growing energy demands of modern digital devices necessitate alternative, low-power computing mechanisms. When incident loads take the form of acoustic or vibrational waves, the ability to mechanically process information eliminates the…
This study employs high-fidelity fluid-structure interaction simulations to investigate design optimizations for wave-assisted propulsion (WAP) systems using flapping foils. Building on prior work that identified the leading-edge vortex…
The robust topology optimization formulation that introduces the eroded and dilated versions of the design has gained increasing popularity in recent years, mainly because of its ability to produce designs satisfying a minimum length scale.…
This paper presents an end-to-end framework for robust structure/control optimization of an industrial benchmark. When dealing with space structures, a reduction of the spacecraft mass is paramount to minimize the mission cost and maximize…
High-tech equipment critically relies on flexures for precise manipulation and measurement. Through elastic deformation, flexures offer extreme position repeatability within a limited range of motion in their degrees of freedom, while…
Free-space optical (FSO) communication is a promising solution to support wireless backhaul links in emerging 6G non-terrestrial networks. At the link level, pointing errors in FSO links can significantly impact capacity, making accurate…
In this paper we present a maneuver regulation scheme for Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) micro aerial vehicles (MAV). Differently from standard trajectory tracking, maneuver regulation has an intrinsic robustness due to the fact that…
From a maneuverability perspective, the main advantage of tilting multirotor UAVs lies in the dynamic variability of the feasible executable wrench, which represents a key asset for physical interaction tasks. Accordingly, cant-angle…