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Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
The flexibility of biological propulsors such as wings and fins is believed to contribute to the higher performance of flying and swimming animals compared with their engineered peers. Flexibility seems to follow a universal design rule…
We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as…
In this article, we present a mechanism and related path planning algorithm to construct light-duty barriers out of extruded, inflated tubes weaved around existing environmental features. Our extruded tubes are based on everted vine-robots…
This paper presents aims at mobility improvement of flexible underwater robots. For this purpose, a novel propulsion method using planar structural vibration pattern is proposed, and tested on two kinds of prototypes. The result of…
This research considers the task of evolving the physical structure of a robot to enhance its performance in various environments, which is a significant problem in the field of Evolutionary Robotics. Inspired by the fields of evolutionary…
Although strain-based models have been widely adopted in robotics, no comparison beyond the uniform bending test is commonly recognized to assess their performance. In addition, the increasing effort in prototyping continuum robots…
Planning accurate manipulation for deformable objects requires prediction of their state. The prediction is often complicated by a loss of stability that may result in collapse of the deformable object. In this work, stability of a fabric…
The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…
Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of…
Despite strong multi-task pretraining, existing policies often exhibit poor task steerability. For example, a robot may fail to respond to a new instruction ``put the bowl in the sink" when moving towards the oven, executing ``close the…
The advent of rotor-based hopping robots has created very capable hopping platforms with high agility and efficiency, and similar controllability, as compared to their purely flying quadrotor counterparts. Advances in robot performance have…
Scombrid fishes and tuna are efficient swimmers capable of maximizing performance to escape predators and save energy during long journeys. A key aspect in achieving these goals is the flexibility of the tail, which the fish optimizes…
Mobile robots have received a great deal of research in recent years. A significant amount of research has been published in many aspects related to mobile robots. Most of the research is devoted to design and develop some control…
The use of robotic technology has drastically increased in manufacturing in the 21st century. But by utilizing their sensory cues, humans still outperform machines, especially in micro scale manufacturing, which requires high-precision…
Drift control is significant to the safety of autonomous vehicles when there is a sudden loss of traction due to external conditions such as rain or snow. It is a challenging control problem due to the presence of significant sideslip and…
This paper presents a robotic system where the gear-ratio of an actuator is dynamically changed to either leverage or attenuate the natural load dynamics. Based on this principle, lightweight robotic systems can be made fast and strong;…
For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific…
Modular robotics research has long been preoccupied with perfecting the modules themselves -- their actuation methods, connectors, controls, communication, and fabrication. This inward focus results, in part, from the complexity of the task…
Robots using cellular-like redundant binary actuators could outmatch electric-gearmotor robotic systems in terms of reliability, force-to-weight ratio and cost. This paper presents a robust fault tolerant control scheme that is designed to…