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This work assesses the hydrodynamic efficiency of Underwater Unmanned Vehicles (UUVs) equipped with soft morphing wings compared to conventional rigid wings. Unlike rigid wings, deformable counterparts can alter their aerodynamic properties…

Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…

The principal aim of this Master's thesis is to propel the optimization of the membrane wing structure of the Northeastern Aerobat through origami techniques and enhancing its capacity for secure hovering within confined spaces.…

Designing ground-aerial robots is challenging due to the increased actuation requirements which can lead to added weight and reduced locomotion efficiency. Morphobots mitigate this by combining actuators into multi-functional groups and…

Removing floating litter from water bodies is crucial to preserving aquatic ecosystems and preventing environmental pollution. In this work, we present a multi-robot aerial soft manipulator for floating litter collection, leveraging the…

Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) is an emerging technology designed to harness the power of high-altitude winds, offering a solution to several limitations of conventional wind turbines. AWE is based on flying devices (usually gliders or kites)…

Executing safe and precise flight maneuvers in dynamic high-speed winds is important for the ongoing commoditization of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, because the relationship between various wind conditions and its effect on…

This paper describes a novel amphibious robot, which adopts a dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism, proposing a new locomotion mode. The robot is called FroBot, since its structure and locomotion are similar to frogs. Our inspiration comes…

Inverted landing is a routine behavior among a number of animal fliers. However, mastering this feat poses a considerable challenge for robotic fliers, especially to perform dynamic perching with rapid body rotations (or flips) and landing…

Upscaling is central to offshore wind's cost-reduction strategy, with increasingly large rotors and nacelles requiring taller and stronger towers. In Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWTs), this trend amplifies fatigue loads due to coupled…

We present a flow-based control strategy that enables resource-constrained marine robots to patrol gyre-like flow environments on an orbital trajectory with a periodicity in a given range. The controller does not require a detailed model of…

Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…

Autonomous flight of flapping-wing robots is a major challenge for robot perception. Most of the previous sense-and-avoid works have studied the problem of obstacle avoidance for flapping-wing robots considering only static obstacles. This…

Robots are traditionally bounded by a fixed embodiment during their operational lifetime, which limits their ability to adapt to their surroundings. Co-optimizing control and morphology of a robot, however, is often inefficient due to the…

Learning to control robots without requiring engineered models has been a long-term goal, promising diverse and novel applications. Yet, reinforcement learning has only achieved limited impact on real-time robot control due to its high…

An aerial vehicle powered by flapping feathered wings was designed, developed and fabricated. Different from legacy flapping-wing aerial vehicles with membrane wings, the new design uses authentic bird feathers to fabricate wings. In field…

This paper presents the Spinning Blimp, a novel lighter-than-air (LTA) aerial vehicle designed for low-energy stable flight. Utilizing an oblate spheroid helium balloon for buoyancy, the vehicle achieves minimal energy consumption while…

Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…

Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…

Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…