Related papers: The DISTANT Design for Remote Transmission and Ste…
Legged rovers provide enhanced mobility compared to wheeled platforms, enabling navigation on steep and irregular planetary terrains. However, traditional legged locomotion might be energetically inefficient and potentially dangerous to the…
An efficient communication mechanism forms the backbone for any multi-robot system to achieve fruitful collaboration and coordination. Limitation in the existing asynchronous transmission based strategies in fast dissemination and…
Future multi-spacecraft missions require robust autonomous trajectory optimization capabilities to ensure safe and efficient rendezvous operations. This capability hinges on solving non-convex optimal control problems in real-time, although…
Although autonomy has gained widespread usage in structured and controlled environments, robotic autonomy in unknown and off-road terrain remains a difficult problem. Extreme, off-road, and unstructured environments such as undeveloped…
The collision avoidance constraints are prominent as non-convex, non-differentiable, and challenging when defined in optimization-based motion planning problems. To overcome these issues, this paper presents a novel non-conservative…
Wheeled robots are highly efficient in human living environments. However, conventional wheeled designs, with their limited degrees of freedom and constraints in robot configuration, struggle to simultaneously achieve stability,…
This paper proposes an initial theory for robotic systems that can be fully self-maintaining. The new design principles focus on functional survival of the robots over long periods of time without human maintenance. Self-maintaining…
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…
With ongoing development of autonomous driving systems and increasing desire for deployment, researchers continue to seek reliable approaches for ADS systems. The virtual simulation test (VST) has become a prominent approach for testing…
Wireless energy transfer (WET) is a ground-breaking technology for cutting the last wire between mobile sensors and power grids in smart cities. Yet, WET only offers effective transmission of energy over a short distance. Robotic WET is an…
A key challenge to ensuring the rapid transition of robotic systems from the industrial sector to more ubiquitous applications is the development of algorithms that can guarantee safe operation while in close proximity to humans. Motion…
This paper presents the design of a small aerial robot for inhabited microgravity environments, such as orbiting space stations (e.g., ISS). In particular, we target a fleet of robots, called Space CoBots, for collaborative tasks with…
Interstellar comets arrive with key ingredients for deep-space platforms already in place: volatile inventories convertible to propellant, natural rotation providing continuous attitude variation, and hyperbolic trajectories that carry them…
In this paper, I present vectorable thrust control for different locomotion modes by a novel quadruped robot, SPIDAR, equipped with vectoring rotor in each link. First, the robot's unique mechanical design, the dynamics model, and the basic…
Multi-legged elongate robots hold promise for maneuvering through complex environments. Prior work has demonstrated that reliable locomotion can be achieved using open-loop body undulation and foot placement on rugose terrain. However,…
A novel dynamic model-based trajectory tracking control law is proposed for a four-wheel differentially driven mobile robot using a backstepping technique that guarantees the Lyapunov stability. The present work improves the work of…
In this paper, we introduce a new sensor-based control method that regulates (by means of robot motions) the heat transfer between a radiative source and an object of interest. This valuable sensorimotor capability is needed in many…
In recent years, multimodal locomotion capabilities have enabled robots to maneuver in both terrestrial and aerial domains. However, most of these robots are designed only for locomotion, and few possess the manipulation capabilities…
Drifting is an advanced driving technique where the wheeled robot's tire-ground interaction breaks the common non-holonomic pure rolling constraint. This allows high-maneuverability tasks like quick cornering, and steady-state drifting…
Robots will bring search and rescue (SaR) in disaster response to another level, in case they can autonomously take over dangerous SaR tasks from humans. A main challenge for autonomous SaR robots is to safely navigate in cluttered…