Related papers: A Microgravity Simulation Experimental Platform Fo…
In the absence of gravity, surface tension dominates over the behavior of liquids. While this often poses a challenge in adapting Earth-based technologies to space, it can also provide an opportunity for novel technologies that utilize its…
Laminate mechanisms are a reliable concept in producing lowcost robots for educational and commercial purposes. These mechanisms are produced using low-cost manufacturing techniques which have improved significantly during recent years and…
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative transport of a point mass hoisted by two aerial robots. Treating the robots as a leader and a follower, the follower stabilizes the system with respect to the leader using only feedback from…
Soft robotic systems have gained widespread attention due to their inherent flexibility, adaptability, and safety, making them well-suited for varied applications. Among bioinspired designs, earthworm locomotion has been extensively studied…
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…
Locomotion in microgravity often relies on sparsely and irregularly arranged anchors, motivating grasp-based mobility with multiple limbs. In this setting, dynamic locomotion is feasible only through deliberate regulation of both anchored…
Micro-vibration has been a dominant factor impairing the performance of scientific experiments which are expected to be deployed in a micro-gravity environment such as Spacelab. The micro-vibration has a serious impact on scientific…
Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks,…
In this second of three short papers, I introduce some of the basic concepts of space robotics with an emphasis on some specific challenging areas of research that are peculiar to the application of robotics to space infrastructure…
Assistive free-flying robots are a promising platform for supporting and working alongside astronauts in carrying out tasks that require interaction with the environment. However, current free-flying robot platforms are limited by existing…
Future missions to Mars and Venus will make use of aerobraking and aerocapture in order to gain mass through the saving of fuel at planetary arrival. So far only aerobraking has been demonstrated, if the Mars Premier project has paved the…
The effect of micron-sized particles on a low-pressure capacitively-coupled rf discharge is studied both experimentally and using numerical simulations. In the laboratory experiments, microparticle clouds occupying a considerable fraction…
This paper investigates payload grasping from a moving platform using a hook-equipped aerial manipulator. First, a computationally efficient trajectory optimization based on complementarity constraints is proposed to determine the optimal…
Building intelligent autonomous systems at any scale is challenging. The sensing and computation constraints of a microrobot platform make the problems harder. We present improvements to learning-based methods for on-board learning of…
The system design and algorithm development of mobile 3D printing robots need a realistic simulation. They require a mobile robot simulation platform to interoperate with a physics-based material simulation for handling interactions between…
This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental validation of CapsuleBot, a novel hybrid aerial-ground bi-copter robot designed for long-endurance and low-noise operations. CapsuleBot combines the maneuverability of a bi-copter…
We present SpaceHopper, a three-legged, small-scale robot designed for future mobile exploration of asteroids and moons. The robot weighs 5.2kg and has a body size of 245mm while using space-qualifiable components. Furthermore,…
As an emerging field of robotics, magnetic-field-controlled soft microrobot has broad application prospects for its flexibility, locomotion diversity as well as remote controllability. Magnetic soft microrobots can perform multimodal…
We present an experimental validation framework for space robotics that leverages underwater environments to approximate microgravity dynamics. While neutral buoyancy conditions make underwater robotics an excellent platform for space…
The recent adoption of the Robot Operating System (ROS) as a software standard in robotics has contributed to novel solutions for several problems on the area. One such problem is known as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) with…