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What if a robot could rethink its own morphological representation to better meet the demands of diverse tasks? Most robotic systems today treat their physical form as a fixed constraint rather than an adaptive resource, forcing the same…
Adaptive structures are equipped with sensors and actuators to actively counteract external loads such as wind. This can significantly reduce resource consumption and emissions during the life cycle compared to conventional structures. A…
Modular Aerial Robot Systems (MARS) comprise multiple drone units with reconfigurable connected formations, providing high adaptability to diverse mission scenarios, fault conditions, and payload capacities. However, existing control…
Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals across different species to share the same narrow design space for optimal high-efficient and energy-saving locomotion, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate…
We investigate the hovering dynamics of rigid bodies with up-down asymmetry placed in oscillating background flows. Recent experiments on inanimate pyramid-shaped objects in oscillating flows with zero mean component demonstrate that the…
An intuitive control method for the flying trot, which combines offline trajectory planning with real-time balance control, is presented. The motion features of running animals in the vertical direction were analysed using the…
Insects and birds are often faced by opposing requirements for agile and stable flight. Here, we explore the interplay between aerodynamic effort, maneuverability, and stability in a model system that consists of a $\Lambda$-shaped flyer…
The waist plays a crucial role in the agile movement of many animals in nature. It provides the torso with additional degrees of freedom and flexibility, inspiring researchers to incorporate this biological feature into robotic structures…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
Bio-inspired vehicles are currently leading the way in the quest to produce a vehicle capable of flight and underwater navigation. However, a fully functional vehicle has not yet been realized. We present the first fully functional vehicle…
Birds have a remarkable ability to perform complex maneuvers at post-stall angles of attack. The passive deployment of self-actuating covert feathers in response to unsteady flow separation while performing such maneuvers provides a passive…
Gliding offers small fixed-wing UAVs extended endurance and silent operation but requires accurate energy management, especially under wind disturbances and obstacle constraints. Traditional Total Energy Control Systems based controllers…
In systems control, the dynamics of a system are governed by modulating its inputs to achieve a desired outcome. For example, to control the thrust of a quad-copter propeller the controller modulates its rotation rate, relying on a…
Tilt-rotor aerial robots enable omnidirectional maneuvering through thrust vectoring, but introduce significant control challenges due to the strong coupling between joint and rotor dynamics. While model-based controllers can achieve high…
In this paper, we present a novel developmental reinforcement learning-based controller for a quadcopter with thrust vectoring capabilities. This multirotor UAV design has tilt-enabled rotors. It utilizes the rotor force magnitude and…
We present a steady jet flow-based flow control of flexible membrane wings for an adaptive and efficient motion of bat-inspired drones in complex flight environments. A body-fitted variational computational aeroelastic framework is adopted…
We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework,…
Our goal in this work is to expand the theory and practice of robot locomotion by addressing critical challenges associated with the robotic biomimicry of bat aerial locomotion. Bats wings exhibit fast wing articulation and can mobilize as…
Wing flexibility governs the flying performance of flapping wing flyers. Here, we use a self-propelled flapping-wing model mounted on a ``merry go round'' to investigate the effect of wing compliance on the propulsive efficiency of the…