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A deformable land-air robot is introduced with excellent driving and flying capabilities, offering a smooth switching mechanism between the two modes. An elaborate coupled dynamics model is established for the robot, including rotors,…
Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…
The next generation of Mars rotorcrafts requires on-board autonomous hazard avoidance landing. To this end, this work proposes a system that performs continuous multi-resolution height map reconstruction and safe landing spot detection.…
This work presents a prototype of a multirotor aerial vehicle capable of precision landing, even under the effects of rotor failures. The manuscript presents the fault-tolerant techniques and mechanical designs to achieve a fault-tolerant…
Autonomous underwater robots typically require higher cost and time for demonstrations compared to other domains due to the complexity of the environment. Due to the limited capacity and payload flexibility, it is challenging to find…
Robotic Manipulation Surfaces (RMS) manipulate objects by deforming the surface on which they rest, offering safe, parallel handling of diverse and fragile items. However, existing designs face a fundamental tradeoff: achieving fine control…
Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…
Safe, reliable navigation in extreme, unfamiliar terrain is required for future robotic space exploration missions. Recent generative-AI methods learn semantically aware navigation policies from large, cross-embodiment datasets, but offer…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional counterpart of metamaterials, have caught great attention thanks to their powerful control over electromagnetic waves. Recent times have seen the emergence of a variety of metasurfaces exhibiting not only…
During the Mars ascent vehicle (MAV) launch missions, when encountering a thrust drop type of propulsion system fault problem, the general trajectory replanning methods relying on step-by-step judgments may fail to make timely decisions,…
Flight control software is typically designed with numerous configurable parameters governing multiple functionalities, enabling flexible adaptation to mission diversity and environmental uncertainty. Although developers and manufacturers…
The aerial manipulator (AM) is a systematic operational robotic platform in high standard on algorithm robustness. Directly deploying the algorithms to the practical system will take numerous trial and error costs and even cause destructive…
Compliance is a strong requirement for human-robot interactions. Soft-robots provide an opportunity to cover the lack of compliance in conventional actuation mechanisms, however, the control of them is very challenging given their intrinsic…
The control and sensing of large-scale systems results in combinatorial problems not only for sensor and actuator placement but also for scheduling or observability/controllability. Such combinatorial constraints in system design and…
Multiple domains like vision, natural language, and audio are witnessing tremendous progress by leveraging Transformers for large scale pre-training followed by task specific fine tuning. In contrast, in robotics we primarily train a single…
Mobile robots, becoming increasingly autonomous, are capable of operating in diverse and unknown environments. This flexibility allows them to fulfill goals independently and adapting their actions dynamically without rigidly predefined…
Robotic systems are typically composed of various subsystems, such as localization and navigation, each encompassing numerous configurable components (e.g., selecting different planning algorithms). Once an algorithm has been selected for a…
In situ robotic automation in construction is challenging due to constantly changing environments, a shortage of robotic experts, and a lack of standardized frameworks bridging robotics and construction practices. This work proposes a…
Enabling vertical take-off and landing while providing the ability to fly long ranges opens the door to a wide range of new real-world aircraft applications while improving many existing tasks. Tiltrotor vertical take-off and landing (VTOL)…