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Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
We introduce PAPRLE (Plug-And-Play Robotic Limb Environment), a modular ecosystem that enables flexible placement and control of robotic limbs. With PAPRLE, a user can change the arrangement of the robotic limbs, and control them using a…
This paper explores the design strategies for hybrid pole- or trunk-climbing robots, focusing on methods to inform design decisions and assess metrics such as adaptability and performance. A wheeled-grasping hybrid robot with modular,…
Legged robots have shown remarkable advantages in navigating uneven terrain. However, realizing effective locomotion and manipulation tasks on quadruped robots is still challenging. In addition, object and terrain parameters are generally…
Robust Model Predictive Control (MPC) for nonlinear systems is a problem that poses significant challenges as highlighted by the diversity of approaches proposed in the last decades. Often compromises with respect to computational load,…
In this paper, we propose a novel design of a hybrid mobile robot with controllable stiffness and deformable shape. Compared to conventional mobile agents, our system can switch between rigid and compliant phases by solidifying or melting…
This paper presents a new stiffness modulation mechanism that enables infinite-range stiffness modulation in a fast manner. The proposed stiffness modulation mechanism can help improve many robot environment interaction applications such as…
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…
Collections of simple, self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit complex, emergent dynamical behavior, with promising applications in microrobotics. When confined within a deformable vesicle, self-propelled rods cluster and align,…
Simulation modeling of robots, objects, and environments is the backbone for all model-based control and learning. It is leveraged broadly across dynamic programming and model-predictive control, as well as data generation for imitation,…
Soft robot are celebrated for their propensity to enable compliant and complex robot-environment interactions. Soft robotic manipulators, or slender continuum structure robots have the potential to exploit these interactions to enable new…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
Tendon-Driven Continuum Robots (TDCRs) have the potential to be used in minimally invasive surgery and industrial inspection, where the robot must enter narrow and confined spaces. We propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach to…
Robotic cloth manipulation is a relevant challenging problem for autonomous robotic systems. Highly deformable objects as textile items can adopt multiple configurations and shapes during their manipulation. Hence, robots should not only…
Soft robots have been leveraged in considerable areas like surgery, rehabilitation, and bionics due to their softness, flexibility, and safety. However, it is challenging to produce two same soft robots even with the same mold and…
Pneumatic soft everting robotic structures have the potential to facilitate human transfer tasks due to their ability to grow underneath humans without sliding friction and their utility as a flexible sling when deflated. Tubular structures…
Variable impedance control is advantageous for physical human-robot interaction to improve safety, adaptability and many other aspects. This paper presents a gain-scheduled variable stiffness control approach under strict frequency-domain…
Modern applications of robotics typically involve a robot control system with an inner PI (proportional-integral) or PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control loop and an outer user-specified control loop. The existing outer loop…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…