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It is often overlooked by roboticists when designing locomotion controllers for their legged machines, that energy consumption plays an important role in selecting the best gaits for locomotion at high speeds or over long distances. The…
Motivated by a winged seed, which takes advantage of a wing with high angles of attack and its associated leading-edge vortex to boost lift, we propose a powered 13.8-gram aerial robot with the maximum take-off weight of 310 mN (31.6 gram)…
Despite significant advancements in the research of aquatic-aerial robots, existing configurations struggle to efficiently perform underwater, surface, and aerial movement simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal surfing…
Dynamic soaring is a flying technique to exploit the energy available in wind shear layers, enabling potentially unlimited flight without the need for internal energy sources. We propose a framework for autonomous dynamic soaring with a…
Quadrotors have demonstrated remarkable versatility, yet their full aerobatic potential remains largely untapped due to inherent underactuation and the complexity of aggressive maneuvers. Traditional approaches, separating trajectory…
This thesis presents a unified control framework for agile and fault-tolerant flight of the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) in aerial mode. The M4 robot is capable of transitioning between ground and aerial locomotion. The articulated…
Inverted landing in a rapid and robust manner is a challenging feat for aerial robots, especially while depending entirely on onboard sensing and computation. In spite of this, this feat is routinely performed by biological fliers such as…
An approach to control tethered wings for airborne wind energy is proposed. A fixed length of the lines is considered, and the aim of the control system is to obtain figure-eight crosswind trajectories. The proposed technique is based on…
Rapid and versatile object manipulation in air is an open challenge. An energy-efficient and adaptive soft gripper combined with an agile aerial vehicle could revolutionize aerial robotic manipulation in areas such as warehousing. This…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn,…
Sidewinding, a locomotion strategy characterized by the coordination of lateral and vertical body undulations, is frequently observed in rattlesnakes and has been successfully reconstructed by limbless robotic systems for effective movement…
A control design approach to achieve fully autonomous take-off and flight maneuvers with a tethered aircraft is presented and demonstrated in real-world flight tests with a small-scale prototype. A ground station equipped with a controlled…
Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back and forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the…
Insect-scale micro-aerial vehicles, especially lightweight, flapping-wing robots, are becoming increasingly important for safe motion sensing in spatially constrained environments such as living spaces. However, yaw control using flapping…
While undulatory swimming of elongate limbless robots has been extensively studied in open hydrodynamic environments, less research has been focused on limbless locomotion in complex, cluttered aquatic environments. Motivated by the concept…
We propose a scalable cooperative control approach which coordinates a group of rigidly connected autonomous surface vessels to track desired trajectories in a planar water environment as a single floating modular structure. Our approach…
Soft underwater robots typically explore bioinspired designs at the expense of power efficiency when compared to traditional underwater robots, which limits their practical use in real-world applications. We leverage a fluidic closed-loop…
The ability to enter in contact with and manipulate physical objects with a flying robot enables many novel applications, such as contact inspection, painting, drilling, and sample collection. Generally, these aerial robots need more…
This paper presents the first design of a soft, 3D-printed in flexible filament, lightweight UAV, capable of performing full-body perching using soft tendons, specifically landing and stabilizing on pipelines and irregular surfaces without…
Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…