Related papers: Bistable SMA-driven engine for pulse-jet locomotio…
The current understanding of motility through body shape deformation of microorganisms and the knowledge of fluid flows at the microscale provides ample examples for mimicry and design of soft microrobots. In this work, a two-dimensional…
Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…
Electric vehicles and renewable energy systems need batteries that charge quickly, last many years and still store a lot of energy, but current chemistries struggle to deliver all three. Inspired by electric fish that deliver bursts of…
This study presents a modular, electronics-free, and fully onboard control and actuation approach for SMA-based soft robots to achieve locomotion tasks. This approach exploits the nonlinear mechanics of compliant curved beams and carefully…
Amphibians adapt their morphologies and motions to accommodate movement in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Inspired by these biological features, we present PuffyBot, an untethered shape morphing robot capable of changing its…
This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling the dynamics of soft robots, utilizing a differentiable filter architecture. The proposed approach enables end-to-end training to learn system dynamics, noise characteristics, and temporal…
Jellyfish (Medusozoa) have been deemed the most energy-efficient animals in the world. Their bell morphology and relatively simple nervous systems make them attractive to robotocists. Although, the science community has devoted much…
Existing underwater SLAM systems are difficult to work effectively in texture-sparse and geometrically degraded underwater environments, resulting in intermittent tracking and sparse mapping. Therefore, we present Water-DSLAM, a novel…
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…
We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the…
This paper presents a Long Short-Term Memory network-based Fluid Experiment Data-Driven model (FED-LSTM) for predicting unsteady, nonlinear hydrodynamic forces on the underwater quadruped robot we constructed. Trained on experimental data…
Fully soft bistable mechanisms have shown extensive applications ranging from soft robotics, wearable devices, and medical tools, to energy harvesting. However, the lack of design and fabrication methods that are easy and potentially…
Pipelines, vital for fluid transport, pose an important yet challenging inspection task, particularly in small, flexible biological systems, that robots have yet to master. In this study, we explored the development of an innovative robot…
The development of versatile robots capable of traversing challenging and irregular environments is of increasing interest in the field of robotics, and metameric robots have been identified as a promising solution due to their slender,…
In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…
Robotic tails can enhance the stability and maneuverability of mobile robots, but current designs face a trade-off between the power of rigid systems and the safety of soft ones. Rigid tails generate large inertial effects but pose risks in…
Jellyfish have been called one of the most energy-efficient animals in the world due to the ease in which they move through their fluid environment, by product of their morphological, muscular, and material properties. We investigated…
Robotic fish have attracted growing attention in recent years owing to their biomimetic design and potential applications in environmental monitoring and biological surveys. Among robotic fish employing the Body-Caudal Fin (BCF) locomotion…
Soft robotics is advancing the use of flexible materials for adaptable robotic systems. Membrane-actuated soft robots address the limitations of traditional soft robots by using pressurized, extensible membranes to achieve stable, large…
The optimal stiffness for soft swimming robots depends on swimming speed, which means no single stiffness can maximise efficiency in all swimming conditions. Tunable stiffness would produce an increased range of high-efficiency swimming…