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With robots increasingly operating in human-centric environments, ensuring soft and safe physical interactions, whether with humans, surroundings, or other machines, is essential. While compliant hardware can facilitate such interactions,…
This paper presents a single-actuator passive gripper that achieves both stable grasping and continuous bidirectional in-hand rotation through mechanically encoded power transmission logic. Unlike conventional multifunctional grippers that…
This paper proposes a simultaneous control method for the angle and stiffness of the joint in an antagonistic pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) actuator system using only pressure measurements, and clarifies the allowable references for the…
Safe physical interaction is critical for deploying robotic manipulators in human-robot interaction and contact-rich tasks, where uncertainty, external forces, and actuator limitations can compromise both performance and safety. We propose…
As humanoid robots transition from labs to real-world environments, it is essential to democratize robot control for non-expert users. Recent human-robot imitation algorithms focus on following a reference human motion with high precision,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in complex and continuous robotic tasks, however, safe exploration has been one of the main challenges, especially in contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured…
Swarm robotics has garnered significant attention due to its ability to accomplish elaborate and synchronized tasks. Existing methodologies for motion planning of swarm robotic systems mainly encounter difficulties in scalability and safety…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
There is increasing interest in control frameworks capable of moving robots from industrial cages to unstructured environments and coexisting with humans. Despite significant improvement in some specific applications (e.g., medical…
The McKibben pneumatic artificial muscle is a commonly studied soft robotic actuator, and its quasistatic force-length properties have been well characterized and modeled. However, its damping and force-velocity properties are less well…
Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve…
The properties and applications of auxetics have been widely explored in the past years. Through proper utilization of auxetic structures, designs with unprecedented mechanical and structural behaviors can be produced. Taking advantage of…
Volt/var control (VVC) of smart PV inverter is becoming one of the most popular solutions to address the voltage challenges associated with high PV penetration. This work focuses on the local droop VVC recommended by the grid integration…
Compared to conventional robots, flexible manipulators offer many advantages, such as faster end-effector velocities and less energy consumption. However, their flexible structure can lead to undesired oscillations. Therefore, the applied…
In this paper, we propose a novel swashplateless-elevon actuation (SEA) for dual-rotor tail-sitter vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In contrast to the conventional elevon actuation (CEA) which controls…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant advantages in robotic manipulation. However, their reliance on vision and language often leads to suboptimal performance in tasks involving visual occlusion, fine-grained…
Soft robots are powerful tools for manipulating delicate objects, yet their adoption is hindered by two gaps: the lack of integrated tactile sensing and sensor signal distortion caused by actuator deformations. This paper addresses these…
An adaptive system for the suppression of vibration transmission using a single piezoelectric actuator shunted by a negative capacitance circuit is presented. It is known that using negative capacitance shunt, the spring constant of…
Powered lower limb exoskeletons are a viable solution for people with a spinal cord injury to regain mobility for their daily activities. However, the commonly employed rigid actuation and pre-programmed trajectories increase the risk of…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…