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Future robots will navigate perilous, remote environments with resilience and autonomy. Researchers have proposed building robots with compliant bodies to enhance robustness, but this approach often sacrifices the autonomous capabilities…
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…
Origami structures often serve as the building block of mechanical systems due to their rich static and dynamic behaviors. Experimental observation and theoretical modeling of origami dynamics have been reported extensively, whereas the…
We study the three-dimensional equilibrium shape of a shell formed by a deployed accordion-like origami, made from an elastic sheet decorated by a series of parallel creases crossed by a central longitudinal crease. Surprisingly, while the…
Kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting, has recently enabled the design of stretchable mechanical metamaterials that can be easily realized by embedding arrays of periodic cuts into an elastic sheet. Here, we exploit kirigami…
Object manipulation is a fundamental challenge in robotics, where systems must balance trade-offs among manipulation capabilities, system complexity, and throughput. Distributed manipulator systems (DMS) use the coordinated motion of…
This paper presents a novel, modular, cable-driven soft robotic arm featuring multi-segment reconfigurability. The proposed architecture enables a stackable system with independent segment control, allowing scalable adaptation to diverse…
Digital coding metasurfaces have revolutionized electromagnetic (EM) manipulation, yet typical tunable approaches based on active components suffer from the "volatility" bottleneck. While mechanical modulation provides a potential solution,…
Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…
An elastic rod, straight in its undeformed state, has a mass attached at one end and a variable length, due to a constraint at the other end by a frictionless sliding sleeve. The constraint is arranged with the sliding direction parallel to…
From the complex motions of robots to the oxygen binding of hemoglobin, the function of many mechanical systems depends on large, coordinated movements of their components. Such movements arise from a network of physical interactions in the…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Soft, slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and engineered systems, with broad application potential from biomimetic materials to soft robotics. However, there is a notable lack of computational tools that simultaneously preserve…
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…
The wide use of robotic systems contributed to developing robotic software highly coupled to the hardware platform running the robotic system. Due to increased maintenance cost or changing business priorities, the robotic hardware is…
Human-robot object handovers have been an actively studied area of robotics over the past decade; however, very few techniques and systems have addressed the challenge of handing over diverse objects with arbitrary appearance, size, shape,…
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behaviour, we propose a novel…
Continuum robots, characterized by their high flexibility and infinite degrees of freedom (DoFs), have gained prominence in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and hazardous environment exploration. However, the intrinsic…
Topological mechanical metamaterials have been widely explored for their boundary states, which can be robustly isolated or transported in a controlled manner. However, such systems often require pre-configured design or complex active…
A promising approach of designing mesostructured materials with novel physical behavior is to combine unique optical and electronic properties of solid nanoparticles with long-range ordering and facile response of soft matter to weak…