Related papers: Pogobot: an Open-Source, Low-Cost Robot for Swarm …
This paper presents a low-cost, centralized modular underwater robot platform, ModCube, which can be used to study swarm coordination for a wide range of tasks in underwater environments. A ModCube structure consists of multiple ModCube…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Recent advances in learned control, large-scale simulation, and generative models have accelerated progress toward general-purpose robotic controllers, yet the field still lacks platforms suitable for safe, expressive, long-term deployment…
Designing robotic systems that can change their physical form factor as well as their compliance to adapt to environmental constraints remains a major conceptual and technical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Granulobot, a…
Active matter systems use their internal or ambient source of energy and dissipate them at the scale of individual constituent particles to generate motion. Direct measurement of the energy influx for individual particles has not been…
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…
Swarm robots, which are inspired from the way insects behave collectively in order to achieve a common goal, have become a major part of research with applications involving search and rescue, area exploration, surveillance etc. In this…
Detecting falls among the elderly and alerting their community responders can save countless lives. We design and develop a low-cost mobile robot that periodically searches the house for the person being monitored and sends an email to a…
We present a design, model, and control for a novel jumping-flying robot that is called PogoDrone. The robot is composed of a quadrotor with a passive mechanism for jumping. The robot can continuously jump in place or fly like a normal…
Chatbots can be a good way to interact with IoT devices, and other information systems: they can provide information with a convenient interface for casual or frequent interaction. Sometimes there can be good reasons to have more than one…
We present a novel design for a low-cost robotic boat powered by a single actuator, useful for both modular and swarming applications. The boat uses the conservation of angular momentum and passive flippers to convert the motion of a single…
This paper presents UAIbot, a free and open-source web-based robotics simulator designed to address the educational and research challenges conventional simulation platforms generally face. The Python and JavaScript interfaces of UAIbot…
In this review we argue for the creation of a physics of moving systems -- a locomotion "robophysics" -- which we define as the pursuit of the discovery of principles of self generated motion. Robophysics can provide an important…
We present Buzz, a novel programming language for heterogeneous robot swarms. Buzz advocates a compositional approach, offering primitives to define swarm behaviors both from the perspective of the single robot and of the overall swarm.…
The Michigan Robotics MBot is a low-cost mobile robot platform that has been used to train over 1,400 students in autonomous navigation since 2014 at the University of Michigan and our collaborating colleges. The MBot platform was designed…
Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…
Robots "in-the-wild" encounter and must traverse widely varying terrain, ranging from solid ground to granular materials like sand to full liquids. Numerous approaches exist, including wheeled and legged robots, each excelling in specific…
This paper introduces Borinot, an open-source flying robotic platform designed to perform hybrid agile locomotion and manipulation. This platform features a compact and powerful hexarotor that can be outfitted with torque-actuated…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Swarm robotics is a creative method of organizing multi-robot structures, consisting of many basic robots influenced by communal insects. The greatest astonishing attribute of swarm robots is their capacity to function together to…